In Waiting

The Server ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 124-166
Author(s):  
Markus Krajewski
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
The World

This chapter explains the figure of the servant in literature. The focus here is on the eighteenth century, via a close reading of Miss Sara Sampson. Paying close attention to Goethe's long list of servants (and especially to his valet Carl Stadelmann), the chapter examines the articulation of power relations between master and subject and, further, the topos of the world upside down, which threatens to turn those power structures on their head. The chapter concludes with a discussion of mimetic desire. Using examples from Goethe and Proust, it shows not merely how servants mimic the behavior of their masters but also how the actions subalterns imitate come to affect, in turn, the models set by their superiors.

Werewolf Wollstonecraft

2020 ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
Chris Washington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Dynamic Power ◽  
Karen Barad

The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.

Varia: Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800): The Horrors of Alienation, War, Slavery, and Social Segregation

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rayna Rosenova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Social Segregation ◽  
Historical Issues ◽  
Selection Of

The article discusses a selection of poems from Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800), offering a close reading to show how Robinson engaged with pertinent historical issues, such as slavery, war and power relations, that marked the last decade of the eighteenth century. It explores Robinson’s use of Gothic and sublime aesthetics to communicate the ruptures found in society and to represent various states of otherness. In the poems under discussion, the Gothic is used to externalize both psychological and social collapse, communicating the sense of instability, vulnerability, alienation, anxiety, and fragmentation. Robinson’s use of Gothic conventions creates a gloomy atmosphere which seeks to accentuate the ills of eighteenth-century British politics and society and to engage the reader sympathetically.

The Cine-Poetry of Mário Peixoto’s Limite

2018 ◽  
pp. 208-223
Author(s):  
Maite Conde
Keyword(s):  
Visual Fields ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Real ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Made In

This chapter undertakes a close reading of the Brazilian experimental silent film Limite, made in 1930 by Mário Peixoto. It pays close attention to the context of the film’s production: Peixoto’s contact with the world of cinephilia in Brazil and his links to the European avant-garde. In doing so, it analyzes the film’s style in the light of Germaine Dulac’s emphasis on cinema’s visual rhythms. Rather than providing us with a story or even presenting us with the psychological state of mind among its characters, it shows how Peixoto’s film “thinks” in pictures, movements, and angles, trying to intertwine diverse visual fields by using certain symbolic themes and variations. The chapter this shows how Limite accomplishes what Dulac had demanded in 1927: the “real” filmmaker should “divest cinema of all elements not particular to it, to seek its true essence in the consciousness of movement and visual rhythms.”

scholarly journals Vampire and Empire: Dracula and the Imperial Gaze

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stu Burns
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
The World ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
Going Native

Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel <em>Dracula</em> was enmeshed in the discourse of British Imperialism, both in its composition and its reception. Stoker drew on Imperial-era studies to lend his narrative verisimilitude, including material on history, folklore, and geography from all over the world. As the range of Orientalist studies grew going into the twentieth century, <em>Dracula</em> effectively became part of imperial discourse, both in its own portrayal of the exotic,  dangerous East and for its association with the vampire motif that recurred in colonialist texts. This paper will examine the context of <em>Dracula</em> and vampiric tropes in imperialist rhetoric, focusing on the literature and ethnography of regions specifically cited in the novel. These include Britain’s tropical colonies in Malaysia and India, as well as the Empire’s sphere of influence in China. Special attention will be paid to the power relations inherent in the “imperial gaze,” as well as European fears of reverse colonialism and, more acutely, the problems of mimetic desire and “going native.”

Design, power and colonisation: decolonial and anti-oppressive explorations on three approaches for Design for Sustainability

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas B. TORRETTA ◽  
Lizette REITSMA
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Design For Sustainability ◽  
The People ◽  
Reflexive Practice ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Design Power ◽  
Relational Issue

Our contemporary world is organized in a modern/colonial structure. As people, professions and practices engage in cross-country Design for Sustainability (DfS), projects have the potential of sustaining or changing modern/colonial power structures. In such project relations, good intentions in working for sustainability do not directly result in liberation from modern/colonial power structures. In this paper we introduce three approaches in DfS that deal with power relations. Using a Freirean (1970) decolonial perspective, we analyse these approaches to see how they can inform DfS towards being decolonial and anti-oppressive. We conclude that steering DfS to become decolonial or colonizing is a relational issue based on the interplay between the designers’ position in the modern/colonial structure, the design approach chosen, the place and the people involved in DfS. Hence, a continuous critical reflexive practice is needed in order to prevent DfS from becoming yet another colonial tool.

On Girard

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 59-65
Author(s):  
Mark Juergensmeyer
Keyword(s):  
Driving Force ◽  
Critical Issue ◽  
Religious Violence ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Acting Out ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
The World ◽  
Violent Acts

Much of what Freud and Girard have said about the function of symbolic violence in religion has been persuasive. Even if one questions, as I do, Girard’s idea that mimetic desire is the sole driving force behind symbols of religious violence, one can still agree that mimesis is a significant factor. One can also agree with the theme that Girard borrows from Freud, that the ritualized acting out of violent acts plays a role in displacing feelings of aggression, thereby allowing the world to be a more peaceful place in which to live. But the critical issue remains as to whether sacrifice should be regarded as the context for viewing all other forms of religious violence, as Girard and Freud have contended.

Histórias escritas com sangue: Uma análise de processos judiciários de assassinatos de mulheres em Goiânia (1970-1984)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neide Célia Ferreira Barros
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Case Reports ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Country Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Gender Power

This book analyzes the criminal processes of homicides or attempted homicides of women in Goiânia during the period of 1970-1984. We observed the gender power relations in the capital of Goiás, a border region, a mixture of country life elements and discourses of modernity. Hence, through case reports of women who suffered attacks on their lives in a period of intense changes, such as the organization of feminist groups in Brazil and the world, political and economic repercussions of the construction of Brasília in Goiás and mass immigration to Goiânia, we have pursued to understand what it meant socially to "be a man" and "to be a woman" in this capital and what consequences were brought into their bodies, concerning life and death, protection and punishment.

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