Into the Future from Out of the Past

2021 ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
Larry T. Shillock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

Contributor Larry T. Shillock discusses the ways mid-twentieth century film forms limit the role of place on women. Shillock tests standard assessments of the femme fatale before detailing the ways in which noir stories change when approached through the women. Following Shillock's argument, these women often occupy the center of the stories. Shillock uses one of the quintessential noir narratives, Out of the Past (1947), and its heroine, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), to support this idea. The adjustments Jacques Tourneur makes to Daniel Mainwaring’s novel, Build My Gallows High (1946), to show the care taken to ensure that Moffat appears as something other than "a dame, a moll, or an object of male affection." Shillock maintains that Tourneur’s Moffat proves herself equal to the men she encounters. By the end of the film, she is their better since she recognizes the constraints her world places on her as a woman.

scholarly journals The Past Contains a Promise of Regeneration: Narratives of Ireland’s Future in Early-Twentieth-Century Juvenile Periodicals

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Ogliari
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
Definition Of

This article investigates the popular periodicals for juveniles Our Boys, Fianna, Young Ireland, and St. Enda’s, which were cherished by Irish nationalists as home-grown substitutes for the alienating British story papers in the Ireland of the early twentieth century. With Ireland still under British rule, these periodicals were concerned about the role of youths in the context of nation-building and my contention is that the people involved in such editorial enterprises viewed them as potentially transformative forces of society, which not only harnessed the power of the idea of political upheaval, but also forged the agents who were to build the envisioned free Irelands. Contributing to the definition of an appropriate ‘post-independence’ national identity, they thus offered to the young visions of the future nation that predicated its legitimacy upon an appeal to the past and the appreciation of traditions. At the same time, young readers were presented with exemplary models of Irish citizenship drawn from Irish heritage of myths and histories. Hence, through the close scrutiny of primary texts from the crucial 1914–23 years, my objective is to show how the future Irelands first imagined and narrated in the periodicals would find their roots in the past and draw energies and strength from the nation’s cultural heritage.

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.

THE ROLE OF THAI PEOPLE IN VIETNAM – LAO TRADITIONAL FRIENDSHIP

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pham Van Loi
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Thai People ◽  
Northwest Region ◽  
Coherent Relationship ◽  
National Borders

Vietnam - Laos has more than 2,000 km of common national borders. The coherent relationship between the two nations and the inhabitants of the two countries has been formed and fostered in history and especially developed over the past 7 decades. The Thai ethnic group in Vietnam has over one million people, residing permanently, concentrated in the Northwest region, the region consists of 8 provinces, of which 4 provinces have the Vietnam-Laos border crossing. This paper focuses on clarifying the practical basis for the Thai people to play a role in the traditional Vietnam-Laos friendship and propose some solutions to promote the role of Thai in maintaining, developing the traditional friendship between Vietnam and Laos, now and in the future.

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.

A corpus-based investigation of techno-optimism and propositional certainty in the National Intelligence Council’s ‘Future Global Trends Reports’ (2010–2035)

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-57
Author(s):  
Jamie McKeown
Keyword(s):  
Global Trends ◽  
Future Role ◽  
Ideological Bias ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Discursive Representations

This article reports the findings from a study of discursive representations of the future role of technology in the work of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC). Specifically, it investigates the interplay of ‘techno-optimism’ (a form of ideological bias) and propositional certainty in the NIC’s ‘Future Global Trends Reports’. In doing so, it answers the following questions: To what extent was techno-optimism present in the discourse? What level of propositional certainty was expressed in the discourse? How did the discourse deal with the inherent uncertainty of the future? Overall, the discourse was pronouncedly techno-optimist in its stance towards the future role of technology: high-technological solutions were portrayed as solving a host of problems, despite the readily available presence of low-technology or no-technology solutions. In all, 75.1% of the representations were presented as future categorical certainties, meaning the future was predominantly presented as a known and closed inevitability. The discourse dealt with the inherent uncertainty of the subject matter, that is, the future, by projecting the past and present into the future. This was particularly the case in relation to the idea of technological military dominance as a guarantee of global peace, and the role of technology as an inevitable force free from societal censorship.

scholarly journals Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism

2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-685 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Drayton
Keyword(s):  
Iraq War ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic Subject ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ethical Responsibilities

The contemporary historian, as she or he speaks to the public about the origins and meanings of the present, has important ethical responsibilities. ‘Imperial’ historians, in particular, shape how politicians and the public imagine the future of the world. This article examines how British imperial history, as it emerged as an academic subject since about 1900, often lent ideological support to imperialism, while more generally it suppressed or avoided the role of violence and terror in the making and keeping of the Empire. It suggests that after 2001, and during the Iraq War, in particular, a new Whig historiography sought to retail a flattering narrative of the British Empire’s past, and concludes with a call for a post-patriotic imperial history which is sceptical of power and speaks for those on the underside of global processes.

scholarly journals EXPECTATION AND FEAR: PHILOSOPHICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL PRESAGES OF RUSSIAN TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanjana S. Zlotnikova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Artistic Creativity ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face ◽  
Coming Crisis ◽  
Existential Issues

The article raises the question of foreseeing moral and intellectual, aesthetic and political collisions that could occur after the expected changes at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries. The philosophical and anthropological paradigm of the pre-revolutionary era is defined through metaphors and concepts that attracted the attention of Russian philosophers, representatives of the sphere of artistic creativity: «expectation» (of changes, new people and phenomena) and «fear» (of changes, the unknown). For the analysis, we selected the judgments of prominent philosophers who discovered existential issues and related existential problems of the transition era for their contemporaries: V. Solovyov, V. Rozanov and N. Berdyaev. In V. Solovyov, the problem of waiting is related to the loneliness of a person in the face of global discord. Attention is drawn to the concept of «symptom of the end», to the concepts of crisis and disaster. Loneliness is experienced by the intellectual in anticipation of changes, possibly destructive, so the expectation as a context of loneliness turns into horror. V. Rozanov emphasized the tendency to distance himself from the world, Europe, contemporaries and classics in Russia. In Rozanov's philosophical and journalistic works, the future is not discussed at all because it is impossible to construct it; the past, which might have been the refuge of ideas about the harmony and dignity of life, causes the philosopher's attitude is sometimes even more negative than the present. On the example of the great creators – A. Chekhov, V. Meyerhold, V. Komissarzhevskaya and other contemporaries of N. Berdyaev, the psychoemotional tension from the coming crisis, the horror in anticipation of the coming future is shown. Berdyaev organically raises the question of the border between longing and other conditions (boredom, horror, a sense of emptiness), and the border is existential.

scholarly journals Mnemicity vs. Temporality: Distinguishing between components of episodic representations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Mahr
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Orientation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
Episodic Simulation ◽  
The Future ◽  
Event Simulations

Human beings regularly 'mentally travel' to past and future times in memory and imagination. In theory, whether an event is remembered or imagined (its ‘mnemicity’) underspecifies whether it is oriented towards the past or the future (its ‘temporality’). However, it remains unclear to what extent the temporal orientation of such episodic simulations is cognitively represented separately from their status as memories or imagination. To address this question, we investigated whether episodic simulations are more easily distinguishable in memory by virtue of their temporal orientation or their mnemicity. In three experiments (N = 360), participants were asked to generate and later recall events differing along the lines of temporal orientation (past/future) and mnemicity (remembered/imagined). Across all of our experiments, we consistently found that participants were more likely to confuse in recall event simulations that shared the same temporal orientation rather than the same mnemicity. These results show that the temporal orientation of episodic representations can be cognitively represented separately from their mnemicity and have implications for debates about the role of temporality in episodic simulation.

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