The Homelessness of Immigrant American Ghosts: Hauntings and Photographic Narrative in Oscar Hijuelos's The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien

PMLA ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 117 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maya Socolovsky
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Camera Lucida ◽  
Cuban American ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immigration Experience ◽  
Immigrant Experiences

Cuban American literature and Oscar Hijuelos's texts in particular have generally been approached through a consideration of their material, multicultural aspects. This essay analyzes Hijuelos's The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, on which there is little critical work, by combining the novel's descriptions of photography and immigrant experiences with theories of photography. My reading considers the placing of ghosts and memory in the narrative and problematizes the undialectical presence of death in it. Referring to Hijuelos's text as an “imagetext” (photographs exist in it only through descriptions, never appearing visually), I read it through Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and his development of the wounding punctum of a photograph, which produces a melancholy lingering trace of the past in the present moment. In this reading, the immigration experience in Hijuelos's novel exceeds narrativization and is unrepresentable by it.

Uncommon Grounds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us

This chapter turns from a historical account of the development of the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of reading to a textual analysis of the US and Latin American historical novel. Hemispheric/inter-American scholars often cite William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as exemplifying instances of literary borrowing across the North–South divide. As I demonstrate, however, each of the later texts also realigns its predecessor’s historical imaginary according to the dominant logics of the US and Latin American literary fields. Whereas the American works foreground experiential models of reconstructing the past and conveying knowledge across generations, García Márquez’s Latin American novel presents reading as the fundamental mode of comprehending and transmitting history.

Ways of Being and Time

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kris McDaniel
Keyword(s):  
Being And Time ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Ontological Pluralism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Better Than

This chapter develops a version of ontological pluralism that respects two common intuitions about time: that the present moment is metaphysically distinguished but not in such a way that the past is unreal. The version of ontological pluralism developed—presentist existential pluralism (PEP)—embraces two modes of being, the mode of being that present objects enjoy and the mode of being that past objects enjoy. The author argues that this view fares at least as well, and probably better, than other views in which the present is metaphysically distinguished. The chapter also introduces another form of ontological superiority called “levels of being.”

Feeling Film: Time, Space, and the Third Image

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110180
Author(s):  
Luke Hockley
Keyword(s):  
Present Moment ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The World

This article explores what it means to feel film. It does so through an exploration of the interconnections between Bergson, Deleuze, and Jung. Central to the argument is the ontological status of the image in these different philosophical and psychological traditions. In particular, image is seen as an encapsulation of coming into being, or what Bergson terms durée. To feel film is to engage with its therapeutic capacity to bring us into being. In the consulting room and in the cinema, this process is embodied and in some way created either between client and therapist or viewer and screen. The elusive present moment is the site at which the past permeates the present, creating as it does feeling toned entry into the process of becoming. Jung thought of this as central to individuation and Bergson as central to being. Feeling film from this perspective becomes a way of finding ourselves in both the world of the film and in our individual psyche.

A view of the current state of hygiene, sanitation, and public medicine

1923 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-92
Author(s):  
V. V. Miloslavsky
Keyword(s):  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Total Loss ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
The Past ◽  
Premature Deaths ◽  
Current State

Hardly any other branch of medical knowledge has ever faced greater challenges, more pressing questions, than hygiene does at the present moment. The past war has uprooted about 6 million healthy, strong individuals - a direct sacrifice on the altar of Mars. To this should be added about 50 million premature deaths caused by an increase of mortality and those who were not born as a result of a decrease in the birthrate. For Russia, the total loss had already reached 21 million souls by the end of 1920, with 25 million disabled.

scholarly journals Ecology of the Anthropocene signals hope for consciously managing the planetary ecosystem

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (28) ◽  
pp. e2024150118
Author(s):  
Clarence Lehman ◽  
Shelby Loberg ◽  
Michael Wilson ◽  
Eville Gorham
Keyword(s):  
Population Growth ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Human Population ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Minimal Set ◽  
The Past ◽  
Food Species ◽  
Large Predators ◽  
Population Numbers

Human populations have grown to such an extent that our species has become a dominant force on the planet, prompting geologists to begin applying the term Anthropocene to recognize the present moment. Many approaches seek to explain the past and future of human population growth, in the form of narratives and models. Some of the most influential models have parameters that cannot be precisely known but are estimated by expert opinion. Here we apply a unified model of ecology to provide a macroscale summary of the net effects of many microscale processes, using a minimal set of parameters that can be known. Our models match estimates of historic and prehistoric global human population numbers and provide predictions that correspond to some of the more complicated current models. In addition to fitting the data well they reveal that, amidst enormous complexity in our human and prehuman past, three key ecological discontinuities have occurred in turn: 1) becoming dominant competitors of large predators rather than their prey, 2) becoming mutualists with food species rather than acting as predators upon them, and 3) changing from a regime of uncontrolled population growth to one of controlled fertility instead. All three processes have been interlinked with cultural evolution and all three ushered in developments of the Anthropocene. Understanding the trajectories that have delivered us to this stage can help guide prudent paths into the future.

scholarly journals There's no time like the present

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Button
Keyword(s):  
Present Moment ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Growing Block

No-futurists (‘growing block theorists’) hold that that the past and the present are real, but that the future is not. The present moment is therefore privileged: it is the last moment of time. Craig Bourne (2002) and David Braddon-Mitchell (2004) have argued that this position is unmotivated, since the privilege of presentness comes apart from the indexicality of ‘this moment’. I respond that no-futurists should treat ‘x is real-as-of y’ as a nonsymmetric relation. Then different moments are real-as-of different times. This reunites privilege with indexicality, but entails that no-futurists must believe in ineliminably tensed facts.Published in Analysis 66.2: 130–35.

scholarly journals The Historiolae in Belarusian Incantations

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 80-112
Author(s):  
Tatsiana Valodzina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Passion Of Christ ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Specific Comparison ◽  
Christian History

The article deals with one of the most popular techniques in Belarusian magical medicine — the so-called historiolae, the essence of which is to recall precedent situations. This implies that the “disequilibrium of being, which has arisen in human life at the present moment (e.g. a disease), is restored according to a sacred pattern that took place in the past”. The texts declare connections between different levels of the worlds, past and present, but to the same extent between the microcosm and the macrocosm, erasing all distinctions between the real and the supernatural worlds. The present time of these charms prevents the transfer of the patient and the healer to ancient times of the myths. Instead, it is the sacred world that spreads around the requester. The most common form of such charms includes a narrative that relates certain events in Christian history, primarily describing the life of Christ or of one of the saints. A particular place among the narrative manifestations of historiolae is occupied by references to the Passion of Christ. These narratives, in turn, possess powerful life-affirming and healing potential. It is not the logical correspondence of a specific comparison in an incantation that is central, but the very desire to place the situation of treatment in an appropriate context. A number of texts from the author’s field records and archival materials are introduced here into scholarly circulation.

Coleridge’s Rome

2017 ◽  
pp. 267-288
Author(s):  
Jonathan Sachs
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Rate Of Change ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
Slow Time ◽  
Marked Contrast ◽  
Imperial Rome ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
The French Revolution

Coleridge’s comparison between Napoleonic France and imperial Rome seeks to understand “revolutionary time,” that ostensibly new sense of time considered as a product of the French Revolution that sees the future as freed from past precedent. In the context of this seeming rupture between past and present, Coleridge associates the Roman transition from republic to empire with a particular pace and rate of change, and with slowness generally, a slowness that serves as a marked contrast to the apparent speed of his present moment. This chapter shows how Coleridge’s slow time is inextricable from the seeming speed and acceleration with which events were understood to develop in the aftermath of the French Revolution, in modernity. Coleridge returns processes of slow and gradual change into the French Revolution’s seeming rupture with the past.

The Presence of the Past

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Picture Show ◽  
Historical Past

In the tumultuous era of the late sixties and early seventies, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that foregrounded and explored the immediacy of lived experience as both an aesthetic and political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms of temporal alienation and distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown), and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, “the past” is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, whose study bridges diverse conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, media technologies, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past.

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