scholarly journals Theory, Post-theory, Neo-theories: Changes in Discourses, Changes in Objects

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 33-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Casetti
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Film History ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
Open Approach ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Modern Era

Abstract Over the past ten years, film theory has been openly challenged by the tenets of film history, cultural studies, aesthetics and philosophy. The decline of so called “Grand Theory” has made possible the emergence of a new paradigm. This relative eclipsing of film theory is the sign of a three-fold problem within cinema studies. First, film in its new formats and with its new supports is no longer a unique and consistent object which can be subjected to specific forms of research. Film theory’s weakness is thus a sign that “film,” as an object, is now dispersed. Second, cinema has always been at the crossroads of a great number of different fields. Its history is an amalgam of the history of media, the performing arts, visual perception, modern forms of subjectivity, etc. Film theory’s weakness is symptomatic of the urgent need to rethink a history that was never unique or unified. Third, in our post-modern era any recourse to rationality seems to be a trap, the object of study itself being refractory to any kind of schematization. Film theory’s weakness is indicative of the need to maintain an open approach to the subject. Through these three issues, we are witnessing the emergence of a new theory, both informal and dispersed, which is manifested in a variety of discourses that are content to gloss the phenomenon in order better to understand the cinema and facilitate its social recognition.

Competing Languages of Czech Nation-Building: Jan Kollár and the Melodiousness of Czech

Slavic Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
National Program ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
National Literatures

In the modern era, the institution of literature is being reconceived across Europe as a national institution. But the new paradigm of national literatures requires a remaking of literary discourse, including the transformation of critical terminology, and this results in literary discourse becoming politicized. By analyzing the history of the term libozvučnost (melodiousness) in the Czech national literary revival, David L. Cooper demonstrates how this seemingly innocent literary term became a political lightening rod for friends pursuing the same national program. This strongly suggests that, in the formative era of national literatures, using literary issues to discuss politics is not simply a matter of instrumentalizing literary criticism for covert political activity but that discussing literary values is directly political. The example of libozvučnost also reveals how the “borrowed“ discourses of Romanticism and nationalism were fundamentally remade to respond to the modern Czech situation.

scholarly journals Radical Intangibles: Materializing the Ephemeral

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-272
Author(s):  
Sarah Kenderdine ◽  
Lily Hibberd ◽  
Jeffrey Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Intangible Cultural Heritage ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Material Forces ◽  
Unesco Convention ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Museum Display

New materialism considers that the world and its histories are produced by a range of material forces that extend from the physical and the biological to the psychological, social and cultural. In recognizing that heritage is not held in objects alone, new materialism discourses echo definitions of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) enshrined in the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. While museums understand the weight of responsibility when engaging with communities of practice, many still restrict the representation of archived ICH material to oral histories, object biographies, video and audio recordings of songs and performing arts. The technical complexities of archiving the ‘live’ perpetuate nineteenth-century museum display conventions, such as fixed-point perspectives and linear approaches to representation. To address this gap, we introduce ‘computational museology’, which brings a systems thinking approach to 'whole of environment' encoding. Such a framework unites, for instance, artificial intelligence with data curation, and ontology with visualization, as well as embodied participation through immersive and interactive interfaces. The implications of such a framework has yet to be fully theorized but it is evident that a new paradigm of materiality comprising ‘radical intangibles’ is taking shape in museums, which signals a break with both Western historiographic orthodoxies and hypothetical paradigms of tangible and intangible heritage. This article foregrounds the emergence of radical intangibles as crucial new digital materialities that are transforming reenacted and embodied practices, which we demonstrate in the discussion of two longitudinal curatorial projects based in China and Hong Kong: the first, 'Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive' (HKMALA) in collaboration with the International Goushou Association in Hong Kong, and the second, ‘Remaking Confucian Rites’ (RCR), undertaken in conjunction with Tsinghua University in Beijing. Both of these projects are significant for having taken up ‘technologies of corporeality’ – digital paradigms at the forefront of computer graphics, spatial and temporal modelling, and virtual reality. The powerful tools being developed across the two instances have begun to revolutionize ICH as a practice, a mode of transmission, and an object of study.

scholarly journals Space, Place, and Realism

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-154
Author(s):  
Sue Thornham
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Film History ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Women Directors ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist Film

John Hill has described the ways in which male-centered narratives of British “working-class films” of the 1980s and 1990s mobilize the idea of the working-class community as “a metaphor for the state of the nation.” Writing on films of the same era by women directors, Charlotte Brunsdon deems it more difficult to see these films as “representations of the nation.” There are, she writes, “real equivocations in the fit between being a woman and representing Britishness.” This article explores this issue, arguing that the history of British cinema to which Hill's chapter contributes is not only bound up with a particular sense of British national identity, but founded on a particular conception, and use, of space and place. Taking Andrea Arnold's Red Road (2006) as its case study, it asks what it is about this sense of space and place that excludes women as subjects, rendering their stories outside of and even disruptive of the tradition Hill describes. Finally, drawing on feminist philosophy and cultural geography, it suggests ways in which answering these questions might also help us think about the difficult questions raised by Jane Gaines, in a number of articles, around how we might think together feminist film theory and film history.

Philosophic Pride

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Marcus Aurelius ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.

The Fall of Tripoli in 1289 in the Perception of Christian Communities of the Middle East

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
К.А. Панченко
Keyword(s):  
Educational Level ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Religious Polemics

Abstract The article examines the conquest of the County of Tripoli by the Mamelukes in 1289, and the reaction of various Middle Eastern ethnoreligious groups to this event. Along with the Monophysite perspective (the Syriac chronicle of Bar Hebraeus’ Continuator and the work of the Coptic historian Mufaddal ibn Abi-l-Fadail), and the propagandist texts of Muslim Arabic panegyric poets, we will pay special attention to the historical memory of the Orthodox (Melkite) and Maronite communities of northern Lebanon. The contemporary of these events — the Orthodox author Suleiman al-Ashluhi, a native of one of the villages of the Akkar Plateau — laments the fall of Tripoli in his rhymed eulogy. It is noteworthy that this author belongs to the rural Melkite subculture, which — in spite of its conservative character — was capable of producing original literature. Suleiman al-Ashluhi’s work was forsaken by the following generations of Melkites; his poem was only preserved in Maronite manuscripts. Maronite historical memory is just as fragmented. The father of the Modern Era Maronite historiography — Gabriel ibn al-Qilaʿî († 1516) only had fragmentary information on the history of his people in the 13th century: local chronicles and the heroic epos that glorified the Maronite struggle against the Muslim lords that tried to conquer Mount Lebanon. Gabriel’s depiction of the past is not only biased and subject to aims of religious polemics, but also factually inaccurate. Nevertheless, the texts of Suleiman al-Ashluhi and Gabriel ibn al-Qilaʿî give us the opportunity to draw conclusions on the worldview, educational level, political orientation and peculiar traits of the historical memory of various Christian communities of Mount Lebanon.

The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...

Antarctica and Siegfried Kracauer’s Extraterrestrial Film Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Fay
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Human History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Purpose

`Siegfried Kracauer’s film and photographic theory along with cinematic records of early Antarctic exploration explain how this utterly inhospitable continent (Antarctica) and this media theory advance an alternative and denaturalized history of the present. Cinema has the capacity to reveal an earth outside of human feeling and utility without sacrificing the particularity that gets lost in scientific abstraction. And Antarctica, for so long outside of human history altogether, simply numbs feeling and refuses to yield to human purpose. It is also a continent on which celluloid encounters its signifying limits. Kracauer, this chapter argues, helps us to imagine an estranged and selfless relationship to an inhospitable or even posthospitable earth that may not accommodate us.

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