Maurice Blanchot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christophe Bident
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Far Right ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
The 1950S

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the French twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised great influence over writers, artists, and philosophers. As a journalist and political activist, he had a public side that matched his secret and mysterious side as someone who refused to be interviewed or photographed. Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, the only full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, therefore attempts to carry out an impossible bio-graphy. It does so by drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer’s very close friends. Beyond this, it is a theoretical work that follows the genealogy of a thinking that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend of philosophy. It is a historical work, unpacking the ‘transformation of convictions’ of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. And it is of course a biography, showing the strong links between the author’s life and an œuvre which nonetheless aspires to anonymity. In these ways, this book claims that Blanchot’s is a life that has become the œuvre, become a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly, even if they are what drives it. Blanchot’s œuvre is reconstituted in all its contexts, at a time when the critics who attack it, just like those who elevate it in unthinking fascination, often produce one-dimensional readings.

War in Social Thought

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Original Argument

This book provides a sweeping critical history of social theories about war and peace from Thomas Hobbes to the present. It presents both a broad intellectual history and an original argument as it traces the development of thinking about war over more than 350 years—from the premodern era to the period of German idealism and the Scottish and French enlightenments, and then from the birth of sociology in the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. While focusing on social thought, the book draws on many disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, and political science. It demonstrate the profound difficulties most social thinkers—including liberals, socialists, and those intellectuals who could be regarded as the first sociologists—had in coming to terms with the phenomenon of war, the most obvious form of large-scale social violence. With only a few exceptions, these thinkers, who believed deeply in social progress, were unable to account for war because they regarded it as marginal or archaic, and on the verge of disappearing. This overly optimistic picture of the modern world persisted in social theory even in the twentieth century, as most sociologists and social theorists either ignored war and violence in their theoretical work or tried to explain it away. The failure of the social sciences and especially sociology to understand war, the book argues, must be seen as one of the greatest weaknesses of disciplines that claim to give a convincing diagnosis of our times.

Frontiers of Visibility

Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Torma
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Popular Images ◽  
Cinematic Technology

This article deals with the history of underwater film and the role that increased mobility plays in the exploration of nature. Drawing on research on the exploration of the ocean, it analyzes the production of popular images of the sea. The entry of humans into the depths of the oceans in the twentieth century did not revitalize myths of mermaids but rather retold oceanic myths in a modern fashion. Three stages stand out in this evolution of diving mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, scenes of divers walking under water were the dominant motif. From the 1940s to the 1960s, use of autonomous diving equipment led to a modern incarnation of the “mermen“ myth. From the 1950s to the 1970s, cinematic technology was able to create visions of entire oceanic ecosystems. Underwater films contributed to the period of machine-age exploration in a very particular way: they made virtual voyages of the ocean possible and thus helped to shape the current understanding of the oceans as part of Planet Earth.

Sweet Mystery

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen M. Peck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Working Relationships ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Professional Theater ◽  
Standard Practices

Rida Johnson Young (ca. 1869–1926) was one of the most prolific female playwrights of her time, as well as a lyricist and librettist in the musical theater. She wrote more than thirty full-length plays, operettas, and musical comedies, five hundred songs, and four novels. Despite her extensive output, no significant study of her work has been produced. This book examines her musical theater works with in-depth analyses of her librettos and lyrics, as well as her working relationships with other writers, performers, and producers, particularly Lee and J. J. Shubert. Using archival materials such as original typescripts, correspondence, and reviews, the book contextualizes Young’s work within the milieu of the early-twentieth-century professional theater and provides a window into the standard practices of writing and production of the era. The works examined are Naughty Marietta, Lady Luxury, The Red Petticoat, When Love Is Young, His Little Widows, Her Soldier Boy, Maytime, Sometime, Little Simplicity, and The Dream Girl.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

Coda

2020 ◽  
pp. 734-743
Author(s):  
Laura U. Marks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Grassroots Politics ◽  
International Solidarity ◽  
Guerrilla Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Armed Resistance ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Arabic Speaking

In the twentieth-century Arabic-speaking world, communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers’ organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity. The communist dream was cut short by Arab governments, deals with global superpowers, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and historical bad luck. But recently a remarkable number of Arab filmmakers have turned their attention to the history of the radical Left. Filmmakers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have been urgently seeking models for grassroots politics in the labor movements, communist parties, and secular armed resistance of earlier generations. This coda explores two strata of communist audiovisual praxis: the radical cinema that supported labor movements and guerrilla actions from the 1950s to the 1980s, and recent films that draw on that earlier movement. The coda argues that the Arab audiovisual archive holds flashes of communism that have been neither fulfilled nor entirely extinguished. The new films release their unspent energy into the present, diagnosing earlier failures of Arab communism and making plans for new forms of solidarity.

Numerical simulation of gas-solid two-phase reaction flow with multiple moving boundaries

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiao Luo ◽  
Xiaobing Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Numerical Simulation ◽  
Physical Phenomenon ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Moving Boundaries ◽  
Charge Weight ◽  
Phase Reaction ◽  
Two Phase ◽  
Content Type ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Chamber Volume

Purpose – In engineering applications, gas-solid two-phase reaction flow with multi-moving boundaries is a common phenomenon. The launch process of multiple projectiles is a typical example. The flow of adjacent powder chambers is coupled by projectile’s motion. The purpose of this paper is to study this flow by numerical simulation. Design/methodology/approach – A one-dimensional two-phase reaction flow model and MacCormack difference scheme are implemented in a computational code, and the code is used to simulate the launch process of a system of multiple projectiles. For different launching rates and loading conditions, the simulated results of the launch process of three projectiles are obtained and discussed. Findings – At low launching rates, projectiles fired earlier in the series have little effect on the launch processes of projectiles fired later. However, at higher launching rates, the projectiles fired first have a great influence on the launch processes of projectiles fired later. As the launching rate increases, the maximum breech pressure for the later projectiles increases. Although the muzzle velocities increase initially, they reach a maximum at some launching rate, and then decrease rapidly. The muzzle velocities and maximum breech pressures of the three projectiles have an approximate linear relationship with the charge weight, propellant web size and chamber volume. Originality/value – This paper presents a prediction tool to understand the physical phenomenon of the gas-solid two-phase reaction flow with multi-moving boundaries, and can be used as a research tool for future interior ballistics studies of launch system of multiple projectiles.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

The Location of “Korean” Culture: Ch'oe Chaesŏ and Korean Literature in a Time of Transition

2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serk-Bae Suh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Early Life ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Japanese Empire ◽  
Colonial Korea ◽  
Korean Culture ◽  
Korean Literature ◽  
Cultural Autonomy ◽  
Japanese Colonial

This essay focuses on Ch'oe Chaesŏ, a leading Korean intellectual, active translator of English literary criticism, and editor in chief of Kokumin Bungaku (National Literature), a prominent Japanese-language journal published in colonial Korea. Ch'oe asserted that the unfolding of history in the twentieth century demanded a paradigmatic transition from liberalism to state-centered nationalism in culture. He also privileged everyday life as allowing people to live as members of communities that ultimately are integrated into the state. By positioning Koreans firmly as subjects of the Japanese state, his argument implied that the colonized should be treated on a par with the colonizers. Further, Ch'oe advocated Koreans' cultural autonomy as an ethnic group within the Japanese empire. Tracing Ch'oe's early life and examining his critical essays on nation, culture, and state, the author discusses how his endeavors to establish an autonomous space for Korean culture simultaneously legitimized Japanese colonial control.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Taira Field
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Image Fit ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Back To Africa

“Grandpa went back to Africa with Garvey,” my grandmother recalled. I carried this precious refrain into the archives with me. In Garvey’s place, I found Chief Sam, in the black and Indian borderlands of Oklahoma. While the Great Migration had largely displaced the preceding history of black rural emigration at the nadir, so had Garveyism displaced descendants’ memories of the Chief Sam movement. Meanwhile, scholars portrayed the movement as the product of a single charismatic charlatan and his nameless, faceless followers. Relying almost exclusively on U.S. sources and the memories of those “left behind” in an economically depressed and politically repressed Jim Crow Oklahoma, the only book-length study of the movement, written in the 1950s, argued that the Chief Sam movement illustrated “the desperate hopes of an utterly desperate group of people.” The image fit easily with twentieth-century American tropes of black victimhood and criminality....

scholarly journals Art (and) Criticism: Hart Crane and David Siqueiros

Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 229-243
Author(s):  
Alicja Piechucka
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Hart Crane ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

The article focuses on an analysis of Hart Crane’s essay “Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros.” One of Crane’s few art-historical texts, the critical piece in question is first of all a tribute to the American poet’s friend, the Mexican painter David Siqueiros. The author of a portrait of Crane, Siqueiros is a major artist, one of the leading figures that marked the history of Mexican painting in the first half of the twentieth century. While it is interesting to delve into the way Crane approaches painting in general and Siqueiros’ oeuvre in particular, an analysis of the essay with which the present article is concerned is also worthwhile for another reason. Like many examples of art criticism—and literary criticism, for that matter—“Note on the Paintings of David Siqueiros” reveals a lot not only about the artist it revolves around, but also about its author, an artist in his own right. In a text written in the last year of his life, Hart Crane therefore voices concerns which have preoccupied him as a poet and which, more importantly, are central to modernist art and literature.

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