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Introduction: On William Blake, Nature, and Mortality

Catherine Osborne

in Dumb Beasts and Dead Philosophers: Humanity and the Humane in Ancient Philosophy and Literature

This introductory chapter presents a discussion of Blake's ‘Auguries of Innocence’ and ‘The Fly’, and of an extract from Shakespeare's Henry IV Part One. It illustrates the claim that not all ... More

This introductory chapter presents a discussion of Blake's ‘Auguries of Innocence’ and ‘The Fly’, and of an extract from Shakespeare's Henry IV Part One. It illustrates the claim that not all philosophical persuasion takes the form of academic argument; that literature can be more effective in this role; that moral understanding involves having one's sensibilities aligned with genuine value, so as to be able to see it right; and that science cannot tell us what to value, or how to construct a moral taxonomy. The chapter compares the appreciation of value in nature with the appreciation of value in art, and questions the idea that human life is of supreme value, just in virtue of being human.Less

After the American Century: Ends of Circulation

Brian T. Edwards

in After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East

In the digital age, American culture is taken up in the Middle East and North Africa in ways that detach the cultural product from its American referent and thereby shatters the presumptions of ... More

In the digital age, American culture is taken up in the Middle East and North Africa in ways that detach the cultural product from its American referent and thereby shatters the presumptions of Luce's American Century. Response to "Innocence of Muslims" in Arab world discussed as example of speed of circulation in digital age and power of culture to affect politics.Less

Blake

Morton D. Paley

in Apocalypse and Millenium in English Romantic Poetry

This chapter examines the interpretation and explanation of the topics of apocalypse and millennium in the works of English Romantic poet William Blake. In his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake ... More

This chapter examines the interpretation and explanation of the topics of apocalypse and millennium in the works of English Romantic poet William Blake. In his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake has introduced millennium that is coeval with apocalypse. He has shown in this work his knowledge of millenarian tradition and the apocalyptic destruction of the world. These topics have been a central concern in Blake's prophetic poems written in the 1790s and can also be observed in his other poems including Songs of Innocence and The French Revolution.Less

Conclusion

Andrew Talle

in Beyond Bach: Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century

The conclusion of Beyond Bach affirms the principle that music is not an object but rather a means by which human beings relate to one another. In Bach’s Germany, those who heard keyboard ... More

The conclusion of Beyond Bach affirms the principle that music is not an object but rather a means by which human beings relate to one another. In Bach’s Germany, those who heard keyboard performances listened not only to the notes and rhythms themselves but also for what they revealed about the character of those who played them. While keyboards were regarded by Bach’s contemporaries as having a civilizing effect, the innocence with which they were associated often veiled more controversial activities. Bach himself was universally admired for his extraordinary skills but many listeners found his music frustrating for its challenges. For a relatively small group of connoisseurs, however, his work embodied the noble ideal that music could do more than entertain.Less

Under Mt. Cheiron

Susan G. Davis

in Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs: The Uncensored Life of Gershon Legman

From the late 1970s until his final illness, Legman worked to bring his big projects to press and to write his memoirs. Turning back to his work on erotic folk song, Legman aimed to complete his ... More

From the late 1970s until his final illness, Legman worked to bring his big projects to press and to write his memoirs. Turning back to his work on erotic folk song, Legman aimed to complete his long-delayed “Ballad” manuscript but decided that it was more important to bring out Vance Randolph’s unpublished manuscripts on erotic folklore of the Ozarks. These became two volumes edited and introduced by Legman, Roll Me in Your Arms and Blow the Candle Out (1992). Legman also began his memoir, Peregrine Penis: An Autobiography of Innocence, detailing his growing up, his self-education in sex research, and his erotic and publishing adventures. This chapter shows Legman reconstructing and evaluating past incidents with his correspondents, especially Jay Landesman. In 1986 he made his last visit to the United States for a lecture tour. In France he continued to receive writers who interviewed him about his life’s work and views on sex and censorship. After a long period of ill health, Legman died of the results of a stroke in February 1999. A conclusion to this chapter emphasizes Legman’s bibliographic contributions to the history of erotica and sexuality and evaluates his place in folklore scholarship, a discipline that received him with ambivalence.Less

‘Time Turning Into Space’: Innocence of Memories’ Prismatic Istanbul

Tim O’Farrell

in World Cinema and the Essay Film: Transnational Perspectives on a Global Practice

This chapter argues for a complex spatialisation of time and memory in Grant Gee’s essay film Innocence of Memories (2019). Focusing on issues of narrative, the indexical and memory, the author sees ... More

This chapter argues for a complex spatialisation of time and memory in Grant Gee’s essay film Innocence of Memories (2019). Focusing on issues of narrative, the indexical and memory, the author sees Gee’s film functioning in multiple registers, principally as a kind of palimpsest, referring to and writing over Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence (2009) and also referencing in multi-layered and intricate ways the real museum of the same name, located prominently in the centre of Istanbul. Both film and novel, as Tim O’ Farrell shows in an extended reading of the works, straddle a deep love of the past, a desire to preserve and understand it, and a fascination with the inexorability of time, transformation and notions of progress. Fact and fiction are thereby multiply entangled, produced by and supporting the disjunctive practice and interstitiality of the essay film, as the author points out with reference to Laura Rascaroli’s theoretical work How the Essay Film Thinks (2017).Less

Just War? Just Children?

Helen Brocklehurst

in Just War Theory: A Reappraisal

Jus in bello's category of “discrimination” critically depends upon an ability to draw morally meaningful distinctions between those who are rightly liable to die in war (which includes the just as ... More

Jus in bello's category of “discrimination” critically depends upon an ability to draw morally meaningful distinctions between those who are rightly liable to die in war (which includes the just as well as unjust combatants) and the “innocent” : those whose deaths should be minimised as far as possible. It is a staple of debate about the theory that this distinction is difficult to draw, but this chapter argues that the extent of this difficulty continues in fact to be underestimated by neglecting the peculiarities and problems of “the child” as a moral and political subject in war. Through numerous examples and suggestive analyses, not least some which problematise the very concept of “childhood”, the chapter proposes that some fundamental categories of just war theory may be significantly disrupted once we think clearly about the role and status of children (for example, child soldiers) in contemporary warfare.Less

Terrible Flowers: Jean Paulhan and the Irony of Rhetoric

Kevin Newmark

in Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man

Where in the 20th century might one locate the survival of ironic thinking, reading, and writing as initiated by Schlegel and carried forward by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche? This chapter suggests that ... More

Where in the 20th century might one locate the survival of ironic thinking, reading, and writing as initiated by Schlegel and carried forward by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche? This chapter suggests that two of the most likely candidates would be French: Maurice Blanchot and Jean Paulhan, shadowy figures of ironic theory and its shadowy practice. Paulhan's 1941 text, The Flowers of Tarbes, responds to the unavoidable but perplexing question: what is literature? Far from offering an innocent description of the founding distinction between figural and literal language, Paulhan's text, as read by Blanchot, testifies to a mysterious and dangerous experience of terror constantly repeated in writing. The terror at issue is at once literary, philosophical, social, and political. The experience of this terror found in letters, which includes the paradoxical potential to enable thought as well as to erase it in mindlessly mechanical clichés, is named by both Blanchot and Paulhan: irony.Less

Technology and (Chinese) Ethnicity

Darrell William Davis

in Cinema at the City's Edge

This chapter reflects on the themes of technology and Chinese ethnicity using two animated films by Oshii Mamoru: Ghost in the Shell (1995) and sequel Innocence (2004). In these animations, a ... More

This chapter reflects on the themes of technology and Chinese ethnicity using two animated films by Oshii Mamoru: Ghost in the Shell (1995) and sequel Innocence (2004). In these animations, a post-photographic world is dress rehearsal for ethnic transmutations. Ethnicity, like gender, body, and space itself, is exchangeable, fundamentally refigured in new media forms. Chinatown feels familiar in these animated environments, yet it pushes toward defamiliarized, alien, life-like zones of informational identity. Prompted by Oshii's animation, this chapter rethinks ethnicity as remediated or produced through technology, rather than reproduced from profilmic origins.Less

Innocent Citizens, Guilty Subjects

Andrew Dilts

in Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism

This chapter takes up the relationship between suffrage, slavery, and punishment in the US through a critique of Judith Shklar’s account of citizenship as standing. Shklar argues that citizenship is ... More

This chapter takes up the relationship between suffrage, slavery, and punishment in the US through a critique of Judith Shklar’s account of citizenship as standing. Shklar argues that citizenship is an expression of a relational public standing signified by the rights to work and vote, rather than a legal status. Shklar does not acknowledge, however, that these rights are instrumental in producing the identities of groups within a polity, causing her to insist that universal suffrage has been achieved in the US despite the longstanding exclusion of criminals. This “blindness” to criminal exclusions is symptomatic of a broader liberal blindness to the discursive fabrication of criminological figures. Through the work of Joel Olson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Ida B Wells, this chapter demonstrates Shklar’s presumption of an underlying “truth” to the moral standing of criminals. Yet there is little reason to assume that categories of “guilty” and “innocent” are stable reflections of one’s actions, but rather are built on previous notions of membership and labor under chattel slavery. The perverse outcome is that voting becomes a fetish object; it is not simply a demonstration of membership and political standing but an expression of innocence purchased on the backs of felons.Less

Edith Wharton: A Citizen of the World

Meredith L. Goldsmith and Emily J. Orlando

in Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism

This introductory chapter explores Wharton’s cosmopolitan engagements, beginning with a reading of The Age of Innocence. Distinguishing between the immersive cosmopolitanism of Ellen Olenska and the ... More

This introductory chapter explores Wharton’s cosmopolitan engagements, beginning with a reading of The Age of Innocence. Distinguishing between the immersive cosmopolitanism of Ellen Olenska and the liberal, yet dilettantish cosmopolitanism of Newland Archer, the chapter argues that Wharton would balance disparate cosmopolitanisms throughout her career. Positioning Wharton’s career in relation to cosmopolitan theory, in particular the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah and Bruce Robbins, the chapter argues that viewing Wharton’s global and transnational engagements offers new insights into her work. In addition, it argues for reading Wharton’s work more actively across genre, demonstrating how critics have made a false division between Wharton’s fiction, political writings, and non-fiction prose.Less

Late Novels

Hugh Adlington

in Penelope Fitzgerald

This chapter examines the four ‘late’ novels that are the peak of Penelope Fitzgerald’s achievement as a writer: Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower. Each novel ... More

This chapter examines the four ‘late’ novels that are the peak of Penelope Fitzgerald’s achievement as a writer: Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower. Each novel is, at least superficially, a work of historical fiction in that it is set in the past: in 1950s Italy, in revolutionary Russia, in Edwardian England, and in late-eighteenth-century Germany respectively. But history is decidedly not the defining feature of these novels. Rather, as this chapter shows, all four works are characterized by their bold experimentation with narrative form and style, reflecting an intense concern with profound questions of body, mind and spirit that culminates in Fitzgerald’s haunting masterpiece, the story of the idealized yearning of the German Romantic poet Novalis both for Sophie von Kühn, his ‘heart’s heart’, and for revelation. Through close analysis of Fitzgerald’s methods of research, composition and editing, this chapter proposes fresh ways of thinking about the stylistic means by which these late novels create fictional worlds that expand to fill the reader’s imagination, and even appear to possess an existence independent of the novels themselves.Less

3-D Computer Graphics: Creating and Teaching Professional Animated Techniques in Innocence and Doraemon—IKIF (Tokumitsu Kifune + Sonoko Ishida)

Tokumitsu Kifune and Sonoko Ishida

in Japanese Animation: East Asian Perspectives

Digital technology has paved the way for the development of advanced techniques in Japanese animation production. In addition to widening the variety of production methodology in animation, ... More

Digital technology has paved the way for the development of advanced techniques in Japanese animation production. In addition to widening the variety of production methodology in animation, digitalization has also made it possible for people with little experience, such as students, to be involved in the production of animated films for theatrical release. This chapter discusses the use of 3D computer graphics in the making of two Japanese animated films—Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) and Doraemon (2004)—both of which were produced by IKIF+, a company founded by animators Ishida Sonoko and Kifune Tokumitsu. It also describes a Doraemon project called “Renewal,” when the voice actors of the television series were changed and a new production system was used. The focus is on the animated opening title sequences that enabled artists to challenge visual experiments.Less

Workmanship and Wildness: Katherine Mansfield on Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence

Emily Ridge

in Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial

This article focuses on Katherine Mansfield’s succinct 1920 review of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. While admiring Wharton’s ‘skill and delicate workmanship’, she begs to be allowed to ... More

This article focuses on Katherine Mansfield’s succinct 1920 review of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. While admiring Wharton’s ‘skill and delicate workmanship’, she begs to be allowed to ‘entreat a little wildness’.i I argue that, as a writer, Mansfield identifies herself directly here with the ‘dangerous, fascinating, foreign character of Ellen Olenska in Wharton’s novel while the character of Newland Archer is aligned with Wharton herself, as a ‘young man who belongs deeply to the family tradition, and yet at the same time finds himself wishing to rebel’(307). Mansfield’s review marks her affiliation to a dangerous, fascinating and foreign modernism, conceived as a revolt against a form of writing to which Wharton is shown to be tied but from which she covertly wishes to escape. The larger question to be addressed, however, is how far such an implied opposition between Wharton’s workmanship and Mansfield’s wildness is sustainable.Less

Melancholy, modernity and the middlebrow: the twenties and thirties

in Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History

This chapter examines the literary treatment of sophistication during the interwar years. It suggests that the 1920s and 1930s can be considered the Age of Sophistication, because they encapsulate ... More

This chapter examines the literary treatment of sophistication during the interwar years. It suggests that the 1920s and 1930s can be considered the Age of Sophistication, because they encapsulate the balancing between nostalgia and modernness which is typical of twentieth–century sophistication. It analyses several relevant works of the period including Noël Coward's play Private Lives, Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Beautiful and Damned.Less

Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part III: The Artificial Woman and the Perverse Structure of Modernity

Livia Monnet

in Mechademia 7: Lines of Sight

This chapter examines perversion in the work of Hans Bellmer and in Oshii Mamoru’s anime Innocence (Innosensu, 2004). It argues that the film elaborates a massive theory of the perverse structure of ... More

This chapter examines perversion in the work of Hans Bellmer and in Oshii Mamoru’s anime Innocence (Innosensu, 2004). It argues that the film elaborates a massive theory of the perverse structure of modernity. This theory manifests itself in three main forms: (1) the transformation of the human into a universal equivalent that promises yet fails to hold together a broad range of discourses on the modern subject; (2) the consequent stretching of the figure of “Man” to the snapping point, which is also registered as a crisis in the unities of classical animation; and (3) a moment of crisis of modernity that perversion can no longer manage, and this is where a new figure emerges, the gynoid. But rather than stepping in to ground the modern human subject and “his democracy,” the gynoid forces us to begin modernity and democracy all over again, as if for the first time, but not in the form of critical or juridical reason but in material configurations themselves.Less

Introduction

Erica R. Meiners

in For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State

In the introduction of For the Children the chapter opens with a community response to the closure of a prison. Local residents protested the closure, stating that the action would harm their ... More

In the introduction of For the Children the chapter opens with a community response to the closure of a prison. Local residents protested the closure, stating that the action would harm their community and the potential futures of their children. This narrative is not at all unique, as there are many instances across America of prisons closings being protested. America is, with over two million individuals locked behind bars, a prison nation. Nor is using the figure of the child unique. Child saving emerges in multiple social, political, and economic struggles and does indeed have legislative consequences that determine the rights of individuals.Less

Magical Age

Erica R. Meiners

in For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State

The first chapter explores the shifting conceptions of children and childhood, particularly in the context of the criminal/legal systems. Throughout history the emphasis of the child and childhood ... More

The first chapter explores the shifting conceptions of children and childhood, particularly in the context of the criminal/legal systems. Throughout history the emphasis of the child and childhood arouse due to the decrease of infant mortality, the increase of literary rates, and the emerging discourses of human development. Children were no longer seen as smaller versions of adults, but as future adults. However, these constructions also developed along deep racial lines, as the figure of white children were innocent and sentient, and therefore fully human, while black children were excluded from innocence and access to sentience, not fully human, and therefore not a part of childhood.Less