Aesthetic Apprehension and the Novel

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (2) ◽  
pp. 404-409
Author(s):  
Michael Lucey
Keyword(s):  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Honore De Balzac ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
French Novel ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Archaeology Of Knowledge

Even Though the Range of Aesthetic Objects that Have Captured Leo Bersani's Attention Over the Years is Wide, The Novel remains one of the more privileged objects among them and could arguably be taken as the point of departure for many of his reflections. His attention has been on the modern French novel in particular, from Honoré de Balzac to Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett—Proust and Beckett being two of the writers to whom Bersani has returned with the most frequency and inventiveness over the years. In the 1960s Bersani began elaborating a critical agenda for the reading of novels in books such as Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and Art (1965) and Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970). His critical references in these books are also mainly French or francophone. He positions himself in various kinds of opposition to literary critics of the time like Jean Starobinski, Georges Poulet, and Jean-Pierre Richard, as well as the early Roland Barthes. This is also the moment when a certain number of other now familiar French thinkers were beginning to be read in the United States, and so Balzac to Beckett opens with a favorable reference to Michel Foucault, the author of The Archaeology of Knowledge, and Jacques Derrida, the author of Of Grammatology. Bersani notes that these two books represent “in recent years … the most brilliant analyses of the history and consequence of those habits of thought” that believe that “significance precedes experience, which is both expressive and deceptive and which therefore needs to be decoded or interpreted” (4). For Bersani it is a failure of critical imagination to assume that present experience comes to be meaningful solely or primarily in relation to prior structures of meaning, which are simply rehearsed or repeated, instantiated or exemplified, by way of new experience. One could do worse than imagine that at the core of all Bersani's work is an effort to challenge the priority or precedence given by many writers and critics to significance over experience, and it is in this light that an association with some of the critical impulses (impulses that strive after yet-to-be-determined futures) of Derrida and Foucault makes a certain sense. Starobinski, Poulet, and Richard are often grouped together as “phenomenological critics,” critics who view a literary work as the expression of the patterns and structures by means of which a particular consciousness apprehends the world and who view the critical task as that of revealing the patterns or structures of apprehension that characterize a particular artistic subjectivity and allow it to produce a particular image of the world. Bersani's disagreement with these critics had to do with their focus on the “secret thematic selves which inform the writer's work but which the language of the work does not explicitly express.” Thus, “the writer's self” is equated to the work's “principal theme,” and such criticism places an emphasis on “centers … from which particular performances ‘radiate’ and back to which the critic draws the work” (Balzac 16–17). Bersani's preference, in opposition to this “centripetal” critical impulse, has been for “centrifugal” forces, both in art and in criticism: “My commitment to … open-ended, projective, and self-contesting art … will be expressed by a critical emphasis on those occasions in fiction which tend to disintegrate theme” (19).

Duvivier, Julien (1896–1967)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendall Heitzman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Light Touch ◽  
French Film ◽  
The World ◽  
Jules Renard ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Falling In Love

Julien Duvivier was a Golden Age French film director active from the 1919 to the 1960s. He made a name for himself in the 1930s as the director of a series of films treating people on the down and out with a light touch. In Poil de carotte (1932), based on the novel by Jules Renard, a redheaded boy shunned by his parents makes his way in the world. Le paquebot Tenacity (S.S. Tenacity, 1934) shows two adventurers stuck in port trying to make their way to Canada (where there is less competition than in the United States), but falling in love in the meantime. In Un carnet de bal (Dance Program, 1937), a melodramatic mixture of pathos and comedy, a woman tracks down the men from her first dance card twenty years earlier.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

scholarly journals The Global Domain of the Dollar: Eight Questions

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-429
Author(s):  
Robert N. McCauley
Keyword(s):  
Economic Activity ◽  
Balance Sheet ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fiscal Deficits ◽  
Exorbitant Privilege ◽  
The World ◽  
World Economic ◽  
Dollar Debt ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The U.S

Abstract Since the late 1950s, the rest of the world has come to use the dollar to an extent that justifies speaking of the dollar’s global domain. The rest of the world denominates much debt in U.S. dollars, extending U.S. monetary policy’s sway. In addition, in outstanding foreign exchange deals, the rest of the world has undertaken to pay still more in U.S. dollars: off-balance-sheet dollar debts buried in footnotes. Consistent with the scale of dollar debt, most of the world economic activity takes place in countries with currencies tied to or relatively stable against the dollar, forming a dollar zone much larger than the euro zone. Even though the dollar assets of the world (minus the United States) exceed dollar liabilities, corporate sector dollar debts seem to make dollar appreciation akin to a global tightening of credit. Since the 1960s, claims that the dollar’s global role suffers from instability and confers great benefits on the U.S. economy have attracted much support. However, evidence that demand for dollars from official reserve managers forces unsustainable U.S. current account or fiscal deficits is not strong. The so-called exorbitant privilege is small or shared. In 2008 and again in 2020, the Federal Reserve demonstrated a willingness and capacity to backstop the global domain of the dollar. Politics could constrain the Fed’s ability to backstop the growing share of the domain of the dollar accounted for by countries that are not on such friendly terms with the U.S.

scholarly journals Cooperation and Coopetition as a Tools Which Could Improve Leading Startups all over the World

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 228
Author(s):  
Aneta Ejsmont
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Good News ◽  
The European Union ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Leading Position ◽  
Foreign Sale ◽  
The Moment

Building own business is a long-term and laborious process. A person who leads a startup tries to start with building own business by taking first steps toward financial independence. Analyzing conditions in Poland, on average every second startup sells its services abroad, admittedly it is good news, although half of them do not export at all. Half of the startups which export their services and goods generates more than 50% of their revenues outside Poland. Very interesting is the fact that 60% of exporters have conducted their foreign sale since the moment of establishing their business. On which markets do they sell their services? It turns out that the most popular are markets in the European Union (54%), including the United Kingdom 14% and Germany 9%. Only about 25% of Polish startups exports their products and services to the United States. Taking the United States into consideration, in 2008 the USA lost their leading position in the number of startups which are newly created and achieving success in business. Currently in terms of the number of new startups the USA is on a quite distant place after Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Hungary, New Zealand, Israel or Italy. In short, more companies were closed than created, so it was, as a matter of fact, like in Poland. Therefore, the condition to improve the development of startups both from Poland and other countries all the world is to increase cooperation and coopetition.

scholarly journals RUSSIAN PROSE OF KAZAKHSTAN: EURASIANITY AND DIALOGUE OF CULTURES

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (5(74)) ◽  
pp. 6-9
Author(s):  
S.V. Ananeva
Keyword(s):  
Literary Work ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aesthetic Perception ◽  
The World

The poetry of the large genre form –the story and the novel includes «openness» as a fundamental opportunity that is endowed with the author and the reader. The poetics of works «in motion» creates a new mechanism of aesthetic perception, expanding the national picture of the writer's world. The concept as a focus of knowledge about the world expands the boundaries of the study of prose by I. Schegolikhin, T. Frolovskaya and K. Keshin. The concepts of the Motherland, memory, oblivion in the literary texts of Russian writers of Kazakhstan are extremely important. A literary work enters into complex non-textual relations with the surrounding reality, expanding the spiritual horizon of society, while preserving traditions and continuity

Electronic Monitoring Around the World

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Nellis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Electronic Monitoring ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Transfer ◽  
Community Supervision ◽  
Equal Importance ◽  
The World ◽  
Offender Supervision ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Since its operational beginnings in the United States in 1982—where its prototypes were first experimented with in the 1960s and 1970s—the electronic monitoring (EM) of offenders has spread to approximately 40 countries around the world, ostensibly—but not often effectively—to reduce the use of imprisonment by making bail, community supervision, and release from prison more controlling than they have hitherto been. No single authority monitors the development of EM around the world, and it is difficult to gain fully comprehensive accounts of what is happening outside the Western and Anglophone users of it. Some countries are secretive. Standpoints in writing on EM are varied and partisan. Although it still tends to be the pacesetter of technical innovation, the United States remains a relatively lower user of EM, in part because the exceptional punitiveness of its penal culture has inhibited its expansion, even when it has itself been developed in various punitive ways. Interprofessional and intergovernmental processes of “policy transfer” have contributed to EMs spreading around the world, but the commercial bodies that manufacture and market EM equipment have been of at least equal importance. In Europe, the Confederation of European Probation (CEP), a transnational probation advocacy organization, took an early interest in EM, and its regular conferences became a touchstone of international debate. As it developed globally, the United Nations reluctantly accepted that it may be of some value even in developing countries and set out standards for its use. Continuing innovations in EM technology will create new possibilities for offender supervision, both more and less punitive, but it is always culture, commerce, and politics in particular jurisdictions which shape the scale, pace, and form of its development.

On Fat Clothes: Unraveling Plus-Size Design Discourse

Design Issues ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Lauren Downing Peters
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Disability Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Fashion Theory ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article considers the possibilities and limitations of plus-size clothing— a subcategory of ready-to-wear that is deeply embedded in the history of dieting, exercise, standardized sizing, and the industrialization of clothing manufacturing in the United States. In doing so, it draws on fashion theory and disability theory in exposing how plus-size clothing functions as a normalizing mechanism, thereby inhibiting innovation in this sector. The article concludes with a counterexploration of the possibilities of “fat clothes” and the novel w ays of seeing and existing in the world that they might enable.

The Dakar School of African History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch
Keyword(s):  
Doctoral Students ◽  
The United States ◽  
African History ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
Research Collaborations ◽  
Vice Chancellor ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University ◽  
The 19Th Century

The Dakar School, as the historians of Cheikh Anta Diop University (the University of Dakar) were called, had a brief French antecedent in Yves Person, whose teachings communicated to students the importance of African oral sources. He himself worked primarily on such sources from the 19th century. The Dakar School was then taken over and given its name by the young Guinean historian Boubacar Barry, who had been based in Senegal since the 1960s. Research collaborations between Cheikh Anta Diop University and the University of Paris 7 (today known as Paris-Diderot) then became active through exchanges involving both instructors and doctoral students. The Senegalese department strengthened over time, thanks to well-established historians, a number of them being non Senegalese scholars expelled from their own country by dictatorial regimes such as Boubacar himself or others who taught several years in Dakar such as Sekene Mody Cissoko, a well known Malian historian, or Thierno Moctar Bah from Guinea. After Boubacar Barry, the department was headed successively between the years 1975 and 2000 by Mbaye Gueye, Mamadou Diouf, Mohamed Mbodj, Penda Mbow, Ibrahima Thioub, and Adrien Benga, among others. They and their colleagues understood how to maintain and reinforce the quality and cohesion of an original and diverse research department over the course of many years, one that was simultaneously independent of any political power and rather opponent to any authoritarian State and tolerant toward its colleagues. Among them, several scholars are currently enjoying late careers in the United States, while Ibrahima Thioub has become vice chancellor of Cheikh Anta Diop University. However, their succession has been consistently assured by their own doctoral students. Nowadays, does the “Dakar school” still exist? Yes because historians remain proud of and faithful to this innovative past, no because Senegalese historians are now part of the world wide international community of historians.

British Labour in Search of a Socialist Foreign Policy

1950 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-214
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
The Moment

The thinking of Left Wing Labourites on foreign policy since 1945 reveals the frustration, and, withal, the persistence of Utopian hopes in a period of particularly rapid and alarming change on the world stage.The victory of the British Labour Party in the elections of July, 1945 opened up to Left Wing Labourites intoxicating vistas of permanent peace and socialist brotherhood. The moment of triumph was ironically favorable to the fervor of Socialist Utopian hopes. Fascist military power in Europe had been crushed, and thb feat had been accomplished by the combined endeavors of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. Russia, so long the Janus of the socialists, socialist state and enemy of socialists, appeared to be ready for cooperation. Labourites gladly abandoned their “red-baiting” suspicions, and looked for the building of a socialist Europe, aided by the Resistance parties, whose work was generally exaggerated and, just as generally, claimed for socialism. Problems of economic reconstruction were of a magnitude to encourage believers in planning that the capitalist world would itself become socialist in its solutions; and the apparently imminent liquidation of old colonial empires made the radiance of freedom's dawn even more dazzling.

Introduction

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 721-721
Author(s):  
Samah Selim
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Graduate Students ◽  
Entire Range ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Middle East Studies ◽  
Unites States

The question that the five literary scholars participating in this roundtable have set out to answer is the following: “How has ‘theory’ affected the field of Arabic literature in the Unites States and vice versa?” By theory, we understand both the entire range of poststructuralist critical practice that emerged through continental philosophy in the 1960s and the canonical disciplinary object that came to dominate departments of literature in the United States in the 1980s. Most of us were beginning our graduate careers around this latter decade, in departments of Middle East studies or English and comparative literature, and experienced firsthand that moment of encounter referred to in the following essays. A couple of decades later, and irrespective of our institutional locations, all of us, as a matter of course, continue to work at the intersection between national traditions and the world of theory, as do our colleagues in the field and our graduate students. At the same time, there was a feeling amongst us of being at a crossroads of sorts—a certain sense of malaise, or perhaps urgency, that manifested itself in a recurring set of questions about the field here and now: questions about history and reading, about translation and audiences, and about institutional and cultural politics, that all somehow emerged from the era of sanctions and war during which we came of age and that now haunt the time of revolution in which we live. If the present roundtable raises more questions than it answers, we hope that it will at least initiate a broader discussion about the practice and purpose of the discipline of Arabic literature in the American humanities today.

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