Feeding and Reading Ambivalence

Leftovers ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 97-128
Author(s):  
Ruth Cruickshank
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Food Choices ◽  
Bad Faith ◽  
Class Difference ◽  
Church Education ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
Food And Drink ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Church

Les Armoires vides/Cleaned Out (1974) is the first of Ernaux’s many texts exploring how gender and class have indelible leftovers. Enduring traces of the working-class rural café-épicerie of narrator Denise’s childhood with its ambivalent desires and constraints are explored in terms of abjection and of her ambivalent incorporation of the discourses of the Church, education and the patriarchy which affects her senses of value, shame and sexual appetite. The analysis supplements understandings of how class difference may be perpetuated through the (food) ‘choices’ which are effectively determined. Secret eating brings arousal but also (along with poor diet and alcohol in excess) offers insights into the traumatic effects of post-war modernization, as well as the Second World and Algerian Wars. Eating whilst reading offers solace and fuels the narrative with intertexts, but also evokes the transformative dangers of (inter)textual ‘eating on the sly’. Representations of eating and drinking raise questions of the politics of both narrative and sexual reproduction. Indeed, food and drink are bound up with psychological and embodied remainders of gendered prejudice which counter conventional feminist perspectives, and the narrator reads and consumes in bad faith, lacks freedom over her reproductive future and cannot escape inevitable remainders.

(Re-)Thinking with Eating and Drinking

Leftovers ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 13-60
Author(s):  
Ruth Cruickshank
Keyword(s):  
Food Choices ◽  
Bad Faith ◽  
Class Division ◽  
Flexible Mode ◽  
Mother's Milk ◽  
Domestic Labour ◽  
Mother’S Milk ◽  
Food And Drink ◽  
Post War

There is an extraordinary convergence of post-war French thought which, knowingly or not, uses or is legible through food and drink and carries the potential for re-thinking overlooked psychological, ideological and historical meanings in representations of eating and drinking. Some thinkers are associated with eating and drinking: Lévi-Strauss’ culinary triangle; Barthes’ ideological and psychosociological readings of food and drink; or Certeau, Giard and Mayol positing cooking and shopping as creative ‘poaching’ on capitalist scripts. Food and drink exemplify arguments, with Bataille’s potlatch illustrating economies of excess; Sartre’s sweet, viscous lure of bad faith; Beauvoir’s skewering of how domestic labour constructs women as man’s negative other; Bourdieu on how food choices perpetuate class division; the leftovers of weaning in Lacanian lack and repressed trauma; and Kristeva’s skin of milk evoking abjection. More metaphorically, Cixous figures mother’s milk as ‘white ink’ and reading as ‘eating on the sly’, whilst for Derrida, traces and remainders are necessary leftovers of meaning and ‘eating well’ may counter carno-phallogocentrism. Introducing how Fischler’s theorizing of the incorporation of food fuels new readings, and noting the influence of Marx and Freud (and their dependence on food), new critical combinations emerge, creating a flexible mode of re-thinking with leftovers.

scholarly journals Punkty, czyli złuda modernizacji

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-271
Author(s):  
Marcin Kula
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Class Origin ◽  
Post War ◽  
The University ◽  
Second World

The author’s remarks on Agata Zysiak’s book Punkty za pochodzenie. Powojenna modernizacja i uniwersytet w robotniczym mieście [Points for Class Origin: Post-War Modernization and the University in a Working-Class City] (2016) primarily concern the question of social advance through education and Zysiak’s outline of this process in Poland after the Second World War. As a participant of that process — first as a student, and later as a teacher — the author suggests that it should be viewed from the perspective of historical sociology.

Leftovers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Cruickshank
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Food Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Combinations ◽  
Bad Faith ◽  
Mother's Milk ◽  
Mother’S Milk ◽  
Food And Drink ◽  
Post War

Eating and drinking are essential to survival. Yet for human animals, they are ambivalent, proliferating with ideological, historical and psychological leftovers. This study reveals and mobilizes the provisional meanings, repressed experiences and unacknowledged tensions bound up with representations of food, drink and their consumption. It creates a flexible critical framework by bringing together an unexploited convergence of post-war French thinkers who use – or whose thought is legible through – figures of eating and drinking, including Barthes, Bataille, Beauvoir, Bourdieu, Certeau, Cixous, Derrida, Fischler, Giard, Kristeva, Lacan, Lefebvre, Lévi-Strauss, Mayol and Sartre. New combinations emerge for elucidating the intersecting effects of: incorporation; constructs of class, gender and racial difference; bad faith; distinction; secondary ideological signifying systems; provisional meanings bound up with linguistic traces; economies of excess; everyday ‘making-do’; the ethics of consuming the other; the return of the repressed; lack; abjection; notions of ‘eating on the sly’, ‘mother’s milk’, the ‘omnivore’s paradox’ and ‘gastro-anomie’. Possibilities for re-thinking with eating and drinking are further exemplified in cases studies of novels in which – often beyond authorial intentions – food and drink are structurally important and interpretatively plural: Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes/The Erasers (1953); Ernaux’s Les Armoires vides/Cleaned Out (1974); Darrieussecq’s Truismes/Pig Tales (1996); and Houellebecq’s La Carte et le territoire/The Map and the Territory (2010). New understandings of post-war French cultural production are revealed. But above all, the analyses demonstrate the potential – across genres, periods and places – for literary, comparative, cultural, film, gender and food studies of re-thinking with eating and drinking.

George Kennedy Allen Bell, Bishop of Chichester and Pastoral Liturgist

2005 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-203
Author(s):  
Jeremy Haselock
Keyword(s):  
Vital Role ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Liturgical Movement ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Post War ◽  
Parish Clergy ◽  
German Cities ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Church

George Bell is perhaps best known today as an ecumenist, for his courageous criticism of the saturation bombing of German cities during the Second World War, and for awakening the church in Europe to its vital role in post-war reconciliation and reconstruction. This international reputation has masked his many other talents and achievements as a diocesan bishop, not least his work in the field of pastoral liturgy. He had very early contact with the Continental leaders of the Liturgical Movement and became an active promoter of their aims, encouraging liturgical awareness among the parish clergy of his diocese and beyond.

scholarly journals Restorations in post-war period

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 36-45
Author(s):  
Martina Jelínková
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
The State ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
World War ◽  
Majority Opinion ◽  
Complex Building ◽  
Historical Heritage ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Church

Abstract The choice of the monument care methodology depends not only on the preference of the author of the restoration or the opinion of a professional monument commission, but also on the state in which the historic building is and historical stages it developed through. After the Second World War, much of the architectural historical heritage in the territory of the former Czechoslovakia was devastated, and the then professional society faced challenges of how to restore and preserve these destroyed buildings. The following article explains the starting points and selected methods of post-war monument care on the example of three churches in the former Czechoslovakia. Buildings selected for comparison originated in approximately the same epoch, underwent a rather complex building developments, and the extent of their damage was also similar. Specifically, we focus on the Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria in Handlová, the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Bíňa and the Church of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Slavic Patrons in Prague. Although the three compared cases show similarities, different restoration methodologies were used. The majority opinion of the then professional public tended towards reconstructing historic buildings to the state before their destruction, as is also evident in the cases being compared. Nevertheless, each of the churches is restored with some deviations from the original condition. In the case of the church in Bíňa, we follow traces of a purist reconstruction, in Prague we witness a restoration by indicative reconstruction, also applied in Handlová, where, moreover, the methodology of reconstruction to the state before destruction was completely abandoned. Our ambition is to point out the diversity of opinion in the care of monuments, which at that time saw a change in paradigm and began to accept authors’ new inputs while preserving the historical essence of the building.

The Second World War: Remaking the British Working Class?

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-143
Author(s):  
Richard Croucher
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Joint Production ◽  
British Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

In the post-war years, to the 1970s, most historians’ verdict on the Second World War was abundantly clear: it represented a watershed in social and political relations, shifting Britain in a social-democratic and more egalitarian direction. In more recent years, this verdict has increasingly been called into question. Some historians began to judge the war’s results, especially in terms of the flattening of social and gender hierarchies, to have been considerably exaggerated. Geoffrey G. Field has produced a sizeable, detailed and well-produced work which reaffirms the judgements of the ‘war as dramatic watershed’ school. He synthesizes much of the work on British society and the working class in the Second World War, interspersed with analysis of the vast holdings of The National Archives, the Mass Observation Archive, as well as film and literary sources. This review focuses on industrial relations, particularly the arms industries: where unionization, collective bargaining and workplace union organization were transformed. Joint production committees, however, proved ephemeral.

The Censorship of British Drama 1900-1968 Volume 2

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
British Library ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Paperback Edition ◽  
British Drama ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Church

This is the second volume in a new paperback edition of Steve Nicholson’s well-reviewed four-volume analysis of British theatre censorship from 1900-1968, based on previously undocumented material in the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence Archives in the British Library and the Royal Archives at Windsor. It covers the period from 1933 to 1952, and focuses on theatre censorship during the period before the outbreak of the Second World War, during the war itself, and in the immediate post-war period. The focus is primarily on political and moral censorship. The book documents and analyses the control exercised by the Lord Chamberlain. It also reviews the pressures exerted on him and on the theatre by the government, the monarch, the Church, foreign embassies and by influential public figures and organisations. This new edition includes a contextualising timeline for those readers who are unfamiliar with the period, and a new preface.

Squatting: The Fight for Decent Shelter, 1970s–1980s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Housing Policies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Housing Needs ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

During the twenty years after the Second World War, housing began to be seen as a basic right among many in the west, and the British welfare state included many policies and provisions to provide decent shelter for its citizens. This article focuses on the period circa 1968–85, because this was a time in England when the lack of affordable, secure-tenured housing reached a crisis level at the same time that central and local governmental housing policies received wider scrutiny for their ineffectiveness. My argument is that despite post-war laws and rhetoric, many Britons lived through a housing disaster and for many the most rational way they could solve their housing needs was to exploit loopholes in the law (as well as to break them out right). While the main focus of the article is on young British squatters, there is scope for transnational comparison. Squatters in other parts of the world looked to their example to address the housing needs in their own countries, especially as privatization of public services spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Dutch, Spanish, German and American squatters were involved in a symbiotic exchange of ideas and sometimes people with the British squatters and each other, and practices and rhetoric from one place were quickly adopted or rejected based on the success or failure in each place.

Ambivalent Relationships: London's Youth Culture and the Making of the Multi-Racial Society in the 1960s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Class Youth

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.

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