scholarly journals Spotlight on the traveller: Individual experiences of routine journeys

2022 ◽  
pp. 002252662110637
Author(s):  
Colin Pooley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
The Past

All travel generates a range of feelings, responses and emotions that can be stimulated by many factors but recovering such responses to everyday travel in the past is difficult. Few conventional sources provide information on the travellers’ experiences of movement and, not surprisingly, most transport histories focus mainly on matters of infrastructure, usage, and technological change. In contrast, contemporary mobilities studies that can talk directly to those who travel do explore the lived experiences of mobility in some detail. This paper shows how, by using a range of life writing drawn from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, it is possible to begin to recover at least some of the feelings and responses that past travellers experienced. I argue that such an approach provides an important additional perspective to research in transport history.

‘Quivering yet still’: Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and the Aesthetics of Attention

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-75
Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Still Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
The Relationship

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.

scholarly journals Transformation From Aesthetics to Activism: An Analysis of Select Dalit Women Personal Narratives

2021 ◽  
pp. 2455328X2110389
Author(s):  
Surya Simon
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dalit Women

Dalit resistance gained prominence in postcolonial India through Dalit literature, with Dalit life writing emerging as a significant way to address ongoing problems and issues faced by Dalit communities. Dalit personal narratives are not mere reflections into the past but lived experiences with a timely and current sociological base. Dalit narratives have become a platform for social and political activism against various hegemonic discourses that otherwise exclude the experiences of the Dalit population. Moreover, Dalit women suffer many layers of oppression and violence, and there is a necessity to understand the intersectionality of Dalit women’s realities. Hence this article analyses select personal narratives of two Dalit women writers: P. Sivakami’s The Grip of Change ([1989] 2006) and ₹Author’s Notes: Gowri’ ([1999] 2006); and Bama’s Karukku ([1992] 2005). The ₹Author’s Notes: Gowri’ is a reflection on The Grip of Change and the two narratives are collectively referred to as The Grip of Change. This article attempts to understand the extent to which Dalit personal narratives transform from aesthetics to activism. This article analyses the narrative technique and form used in the narratives and explores how the narratives expose embodied issues to foster activism in and through the content.

scholarly journals Mobility, Transport and Social Inclusion: Lessons from History

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 100-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Pooley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
British Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mobility System ◽  
The Rich

This paper argues that although it is now possible to travel more quickly and easily than ever before, transport-related social exclusion is more likely than it was in the past. Using evidence drawn from life writing and oral testimonies I examine the ways in which people accessed everyday transport over the past two centuries. In the early nineteenth century mobility options were limited and most people travelled in similar ways, though the rich always had access to the fastest and most comfortable transportation. From the mid-nineteenth century the railways provided fast travel for most people. Progressively, in the twentieth century British society became car dependent so that those without access to a car were disadvantaged. Such transport-related social exclusion was exacerbated by the denuding of public transport, and by heightened expectations for mobility which often could not be achieved. It is argued that a return to a less differentiated mobility system could increase transport-related social inclusion.

What Incredible Yearnings Human Beings Have

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAGMAR HERZOG
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
Unintended Effects ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Multiple Factors ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sexual Cultures ◽  
Historical Causation ◽  
The One

I was preoccupied by a number of puzzles during the time I was researching and writingSexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History. Among other things, I was interested in the puzzle of historical causation. I was curious to use the tools of comparative history as well as the study of transnational flows of people and ideas, and of market forces and wars and diplomatic pressures, to understand what particular conjunctions of multiple factors may have caused sexual cultures (including laws, behaviours, and values) to move either in more liberal-progressive or more neotraditionalist-conservative or overtly repressive directions. At the same time, and throughout, I was all too acutely aware that ‘sexuality’ – that elusive and contested ‘it’ – was and is precisely one of those realms of human existence that continually defy and confuse our assumptions about what exactly constitutes restriction or liberation. I was thus also especially interested to reconstruct as well as possible, using the broadest range of types of sources, how exactly people in the past expressed how they imagined and experienced whatever they thought sexuality was and, in addition, how they battled over the ethics of sexual matters. On the one hand, sexuality – like faith or work – is one of those phenomena in which representations and reality are inevitably inextricable, and I was constantly fascinated with how people grappled with that inextricability, in all its complex manifestations. After all, not only what was considered appropriate or normal or good (in the eyes of God, or the neighbours, or the doctors, or the activists, or the popular advice-writers), but also what was considered (or even physiologicallyfelt) as anxiety-producing or immoral and/or – not least – as sexually thrilling or deeply satisfying has clearly varied considerably across time and place. On the other hand, I was particularly interested in the recurrent and remarkable gaps between lived experiences and personal, private insights, and that which was perceived to be publicly, politically defensible. The gap between the quietly lived and the openly articulable could be stark; it often took tremendous courage to defend sexual freedom, in dictatorships certainly, but also in democracies. I therefore also paid special attention to how those defences were framed, in each place and moment, and with what intended and unintended effects. So while the twentieth century in Europe is often called ‘the century of sex’ and seen as an era of increasing liberalisation, I was convinced of the need to complicate the liberalisation paradigm.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

Collective Memory: Between Values and Historical Knowledge

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-142
Author(s):  
VICTOR BURLACHUK
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Element ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

At the end of the twentieth century, questions of a secondary nature suddenly became topical: what do we remember and who owns the memory? Memory as one of the mental characteristics of an individual’s activity is complemented by the concept of collective memory, which requires a different method of analysis than the activity of a separate individual. In the 1970s, a situation arose that gave rise to the so-called "historical politics" or "memory politics." If philosophical studies of memory problems of the 30’s and 40’s of the twentieth century were focused mainly on the peculiarities of perception of the past in the individual and collective consciousness and did not go beyond scientific discussions, then half a century later the situation has changed dramatically. The problem of memory has found its political sound: historians and sociologists, politicians and representatives of the media have entered the discourse on memory. Modern society, including all social, ethnic and family groups, has undergone a profound change in the traditional attitude towards the past, which has been associated with changes in the structure of government. In connection with the discrediting of the Soviet Union, the rapid decline of the Communist Party and its ideology, there was a collapse of Marxism, which provided for a certain model of time and history. The end of the revolutionary idea, a powerful vector that indicated the direction of historical time into the future, inevitably led to a rapid change in perception of the past. Three models of the future, which, according to Pierre Nora, defined the face of the past (the future as a restoration of the past, the future as progress and the future as a revolution) that existed until recently, have now lost their relevance. Today, absolute uncertainty hangs over the future. The inability to predict the future poses certain challenges to the present. The end of any teleology of history imposes on the present a debt of memory. Features of the life of memory, the specifics of its state and functioning directly affect the state of identity, both personal and collective. Distortion of memory, its incorrect work, and its ideological manipulation can give rise to an identity crisis. The memorial phenomenon is a certain political resource in a situation of severe socio-political breaks and changes. In the conditions of the economic crisis and in the absence of a real and clear program for future development, the state often seeks to turn memory into the main element of national consolidation.

Aftershocks

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seva Gunitsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
International System ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sudden Rise ◽  
The World ◽  
National Borders

Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. This book offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat—not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism, and communism. The book argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms—by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly—and often unsuccessfully—sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Background ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Heritage Industry ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter introduces the concept of the “archaeomodern” and its connection to the aging of the quintessential modern medium of film. It sketches the historical and cultural background of the archaeomodern turn in the late twentieth century, including the development of an obsession with the past in the heritage industry and the rise of postmodernism. It then discusses two phenomena from the 1980s and 1990s—a mannerist or baroque revival, and the development of media archaeology—that complicate the habitual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. The introduction suggests that archaeomodern cinema was characterized by the return to failed or abandoned modern experiments and other relics from the modern past.

The Obligation to Choose

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Past ◽  
Light Quanta ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Wave Particle Duality ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.

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