“A Syrup of Passion and Desire”

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-57
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Tuszynska
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract This article examines the politics of transgressive pleasure and desire in Claude McKay’s novel Romance in Marseille, as a response to what Achille Mbembe, departing from Foucault’s notion of biopower, has termed necropolitics. In the novel, the interlocking hegemonic systems of racism and capitalism function as mechanisms of necropower—the power of determining whose lives are deemed worthy and whose bodies are deemed disposable—which is executed through the procedures of mutilation, surveillance, poverty, and sexual exploitation. Foregrounding the titular “romance,” McKay’s novel features characters who engage in romantic and sexual relationships that subvert the expectations of heteronormativity, sexual economy, and the color line. Anticipating the twenty-first-century theories that locate sovereign power in the body, McKay politicizes and radicalizes desire as a response to the racialization, criminalization, and dehumanization of his novel’s lumpen characters.

Precariousness, kinship, and care: Becoming human in Claire Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942096798
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Female Subject ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article employs Christine L. Marran’s notion of “obligate storytelling” to examine the poetic structures of vulnerability in Canadian author Claire Cameron’s novel The Last Neanderthal (2017). The theoretical backbone of ideas on the materiality of being suggested by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Erinn C. Gilson, and Matt Edgeworth, among others, solicits a reading which foregrounds the moral upshot of conceiving the body as an affective centre of life and an arc of anthropogenesis. By following this trajectory, I attempt to show how in troping the archeological dig as a biosemiotic archive, Cameron exposes the structural homologies between the lives of her two female protagonists, a twenty-first-century scientist and a Neanderthal, whose bones she has unearthed. The novel’s use of narrative bifocality offers a visceral construction of subjectivity, which takes its bearings from the shared experience of corporeal vulnerability. By thus imaginatively unspooling the affective links between the neoliberal female subject and her Neanderthal cousin, the novel calls upon us both to rescale our conceptions of creaturely life and rethink our narratives of human origins.

scholarly journals New Poetics of the Film Body: Docility, Molecular Fundamentalism and Twenty First Century Destiny

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Fundamental Level ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract Twenty first century film evokes a new topology of the body. Science and technology are the new century’s ‘sovereign power’ which enforces biopolitics through bodies which, by virtue of being seen at their most fundamental level, have become docile surfaces. The film body is at once manipulated and coerced into an ethos of optimization; a thoroughly scientific and ‘molecular’ optimization which proffers ‘normalization’ and intimately regulated bodies. In the film bodies of this millennium, bodily intervention results in surveillance becoming internalized. Now the body is both a means and an end of social control. This essay applies the philosophies Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose to twenty first century Hollywood film, elucidating a new tropos, a new film body/body of film.

scholarly journals “Ae Thoosand Tongues”: Language and Identity in Psychoraag

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Ashley
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Language And Identity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
Twenty First Century

Suhayl Saadi’s 2004 novel, Psychoraag, asks important questions about language, nation, and identity in twenty-first century Scotland.This article analyzes the ways in which language and music shape identity in the novel; explores the tensions that exist between the novel’s competing languages; studies the narrator’s personae; and examines his search for psychic, emotional, and linguistic wholeness. It argues that Psychoraag is an effective commentary on the inherent limitations of exclusionary conceptions of Scottishness, for the novel demonstrates that it is only by transcending traditional notions of Scottishness and embracing linguistic disorder that contemporary Scottish identity can be fully articulated.

scholarly journals Interpretations of Emanuel Swedenborg’s image of the afterlife in the novel Oneiron by Laura Lindstedt

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiina Mahlamäki ◽  
Tomas Mansikka
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Postmodern Novel ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
The Relationship

This article discusses the relationship between Western esotericism and literature. As an example of a secular author who uses and benefits from esoteric texts, ideas and thoughts as resources in creating a literary artwork, the article analyses Laura Lindstedt’s novel Oneiron. A Fantasy About the Seconds After Death (2015). It contextualises the novel within the frames of Western esotericism and literature, focusing on Emanuel Swedenborg’s impact on discourses of the afterlife in literature. Laura Lindstedt’s postmodern novel indicates various ways that esoteric ideas, themes, and texts can work as resources for authors of fiction in twenty-first century Finland. Since the late eighteenth century Swedenborg’s influence has been evident in literature and among artists, especially in providing resources for other-worldly imagery. Oneiron proves that the ideas of Swedenborg are still part of the memory of Western culture and literature.

scholarly journals Beyond Discipline: Evolving Design Practice and Design Education in the Twenty-First Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Furniss
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Education ◽  
Design Education ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Design Practice ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Current Design ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Uk

Since 2000, design practice in the UK has changed dramatically. Boundaries between design disciplines have dissolved, and many contemporary design studios now defy classification. These studios are reconfiguring the design landscape, yet a uni-disciplinary structure still dominates undergraduate education. This is creating a disconnection between practice and education and posing critical questions for the current design education system. This article outlines the findings of a PhD research study exploring this disconnection, and although situated within the UK, the findings have international relevance. An initial scoping exercise draws on interviews with leading commentators from the UK design sector, examining the evolution of design practice over the past 10 years, and possible future directions for undergraduate education. Findings highlight that UK policy for creative education has placed undergraduate design courses in potential crisis. Arguably, the current university system for design education is outdated. It is now necessary to redefine the skills and processes twenty-first-century designers need. The body of the research is situated within five internationally renowned creative studios which defy classification. In-depth ethnographic studies cross-analyse the creative processes of these studios and their views on education. Findings identify key components of each studio’s processes, while also exploring studio members’ educational experiences, and reflections on future implications for pedagogy. This article argues that this growing disconnect between practice and education calls for existing pedagogic models to be challenged, proposes alternative approaches and highlights the need for policymakers, practitioners and educators to work together to best prepare young designers to meet today’s challenges.

Loving Shakespeare

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rivlin
Keyword(s):  
Gender Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Positive Feelings ◽  
The Relationship

This article focuses on Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (2016), a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew published in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, to explore how the novel and the series seek to create affective ‘middlebrow’ communities that purport to keep Shakespeare alive through love. Counter-intuitively, Tyler chose to adapt a play whose gender politics are unlovable to many twenty-first-century American readers, including the author. But although Tyler has said that she ‘hates’ Shakespeare, her solution is surprisingly to inspire mild, positive feelings in her readers. In mediating Shakespeare in this way, Tyler effectively strengthens bonds of empathy and affection between herself and her readers. Extending its claim, the article argues that the Hogarth Shakespeare Project is a ‘middlebrow’ publishing enterprise, in the sense that it uses Shakespeare to cultivate communities built on the relationship between the adapting author and her readers.

The graveyard and the garden: Reading connectivities in Rana Dasgupta’s “The Changeling”

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-206
Author(s):  
Helle Schulz Bildsøe ◽  
Ulla Rahbek
Keyword(s):  
Global City ◽  
First Century ◽  
Community Garden ◽  
The Novel ◽  
National Capital ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Systemic Network ◽  
Organic Networks

In the novel Tokyo Cancelled (2005), Rana Dasgupta explores the contemporary age of globalization as a time of chaotic change. Tokyo Cancelled is composed as a story cycle of 13 tales. This article focuses on one of these tales in particular, “The Changeling”. “The Changeling” relates the tumultuous experiences of Bernard, who is a changeling and archetypal stranger in the pestilence-ridden city of contemporary Paris. The article explores the juxtaposition of systemic and organic networks as the central trope through which Dasgupta explores change and connectivities in a global twenty-first-century moment. We argue that the story presents a process of symbolic transformation whereby the national capital changes into a global city. This change signifies a shift from a national towards a planetary perspective. “The Changeling” comprises at least two different kinds of networks which converge and conflate into one overarching web that is the metropolis: there is a systemic network of control materialized in Montparnasse graveyard and an organic network out of control manifested in a community garden where people congregate to tell stories. Indeed, Dasgupta revisits Benjaminian storytelling as a global networking practice which, while locally contextualized in an impromptu garden in Paris, hints at an awareness of worldwide connectivity.

scholarly journals Biophysics and systems biology

2010 ◽  
Vol 368 (1914) ◽  
pp. 1125-1139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Noble
Keyword(s):  
Systems Biology ◽  
Computational Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Nerve Impulse ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
The Body ◽  
Molecular Biophysics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Computational Power ◽  
Twenty First Century

Biophysics at the systems level, as distinct from molecular biophysics, acquired its most famous paradigm in the work of Hodgkin and Huxley, who integrated their equations for the nerve impulse in 1952. Their approach has since been extended to other organs of the body, notably including the heart. The modern field of computational biology has expanded rapidly during the first decade of the twenty-first century and, through its contribution to what is now called systems biology, it is set to revise many of the fundamental principles of biology, including the relations between genotypes and phenotypes. Evolutionary theory, in particular, will require re-assessment. To succeed in this, computational and systems biology will need to develop the theoretical framework required to deal with multilevel interactions. While computational power is necessary, and is forthcoming, it is not sufficient. We will also require mathematical insight, perhaps of a nature we have not yet identified. This article is therefore also a challenge to mathematicians to develop such insights.

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