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Coda: Composing Oneself (Reprise)

Nadine Hubbs

in The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of the individual and collective achievements of U.S. gay modernist composers. It suggests that though the meanings of ... More

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of the individual and collective achievements of U.S. gay modernist composers. It suggests that though the meanings of classical music, of homosexual identity, and of Americanness have changed substantially since the zenith of U.S. tonal modernism, the history of the gay Americana composers and their work has much to tell us about ourselves today. It concludes that the history of homosexuality is potentially nothing less than a history of human subjectivity, that is, of “the social construction of the self”.Less

The Anxiety of Theory: Hölderlin’s Poetology as Skeptical Syndrome

Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge

in Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community

This chapter juxtaposes Friedrich Hölderlin's use of poetic language with his view in philosophical skepticism. Hölderlin used poetry to mediate between the antinomies of mind and world, as well as ... More

This chapter juxtaposes Friedrich Hölderlin's use of poetic language with his view in philosophical skepticism. Hölderlin used poetry to mediate between the antinomies of mind and world, as well as the nature and freedom. He reiterated that this mediation can only be articulated in poetic language. However, although his poetry aims to link the contradiction of many subjects, he does not believe in the “truth of skepticism”—the recognition that human subjects inevitably strive to have certainty (whether about the world, other minds, or the divine) that they cannot possess, and that this dissatisfaction with the uncertain state of one's knowledge is a constitutive of human subjectivity. Studying these two contradicting themes, the chapter explains how his poetry demonstrates the boundaries between language, mind, and world.Less

Alain Resnais and the Code of Subjectivity

Hunter Vaughan

in Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking

This chapter discusses the connotative structure through which human subjectivity is simulated in film and how this renders cinema capable of performing a philosophical function. It analyzes Alan ... More

This chapter discusses the connotative structure through which human subjectivity is simulated in film and how this renders cinema capable of performing a philosophical function. It analyzes Alan Resnais' films Last Year in Marienbad (1961), Hiroshima mon amour (1959), and The War is Over (1966) as examples of how human subjectivity is decodified in cinema. Resnais deconstructed the “code of subjectivity” in order to experiment with understanding an individual's relationship to the world in terms of political action. This deconstruction is based heavily on the recurrence of certain formal interactions, including alterations to the speech-image code, camera movement, and the constant interruption of denotation by varying types of insert sequence. The chapter challenges popular readings of Resnais that are erroneous and counterproductive and reframes his cinema as part of a connotative subversion of the implications of certainty and unilateralism implicit in classical conventions and constructions of subjectivity.Less

Conclusion ‘Other Fashionings of Life’: Science Fiction, Human–Animal Studies and the Future of Subjectivity

in Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal

This conclusion argues that a close examination of animals in science fiction offers promising ways in which human subjectivity can be reconceptualised. The presence of animals in science fiction ... More

This conclusion argues that a close examination of animals in science fiction offers promising ways in which human subjectivity can be reconceptualised. The presence of animals in science fiction shows the complexities of animals in/and human life, and potentially enables its readers to perceive the world and other species in a different way. Science fiction provides better insight into the difficulties of human–animal exchanges and prompts a rethinking of human subjectivity and the human–animal boundary.Less

Animal Narratives and Social Agency

Susan McHugh

in Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines

This introductory chapter discusses the significance of animal narratives in contrast with the stories that depicts human subjects. It asks: how do animal agents appear in literature, and what are ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the significance of animal narratives in contrast with the stories that depicts human subjects. It asks: how do animal agents appear in literature, and what are their effects? Irish novelist George Moore proposes that social life shared across species can be the measure of literary representation that shifts away from human subjectivity. The chapter describes key creative developments of fiction to explain how some literary and visual narratives are related to the politics and sciences of species.Less

Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Twentieth-Century American Sociology

Neil Gross

in Sociology in America: A History

This chapter shows that despite the prevailing attitude that sociology and philosophy are worlds apart, American sociology in the twentieth century has in fact been shaped in deep and profound ways ... More

This chapter shows that despite the prevailing attitude that sociology and philosophy are worlds apart, American sociology in the twentieth century has in fact been shaped in deep and profound ways by movements of thought centered in philosophy. Thus, at the same time that most sociologists have turned their back on the philosophical enterprise, the most creative among them have actively drawn on philosophical ideas, mining them for their epistemological, ontological, normative, and action-theoretical insights and potential. The chapter focuses on two philosophical movements with a deep and enduring impact on American sociology: pragmatism and phenomenology. The historical contexts out of which these movements emerged are radically different, as is the nature of the philosophical programs they advanced. But they share an intellectual characteristic that made them particularly susceptible to sociological appropriation at key junctures: a concern to understand the distinctive nature of human subjectivity, and an insistence that this understanding preserve the distinction between humans as subjects and humans as objects, that is, the distinction between an image of the human being as an active creature who responds creatively to her environment using the cognitive tools and habits she is endowed with by her culture, and the image of a mere entity pushed along by larger forces, her every action predetermined.Less

The Secret of Life: Bioethics between Corporeal and Corporate Obligations

Joanna Zylinska

in Bioethics in the Age of New Media

In this chapter, the author talks about “traditional bioethics,” which includes predefined normativity, human subjectivity, and universal applicability. The author talks about the “secret of life” ... More

In this chapter, the author talks about “traditional bioethics,” which includes predefined normativity, human subjectivity, and universal applicability. The author talks about the “secret of life” —about the analysis of DNA. In the 1944 book, What is Life?, Erwin Schroedinger talks about the fact that after the ghastly aftermath of world wars, most physicists took up biology as a safer option. At this time, the study of human DNA came to the forefront. The chapter focuses on the origin of the human life, which is no longer a secret but a code that is imprinted on the DNA. Cracking the code of life became the aim of a number of scientists the world over. The Human Genome Diversity Project was launched to gain more knowledge about the human origins, prehistory, and evolution.Less

Introduction: On Orientation

Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge

in Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community

This introductory chapter argues that lyric poetry can create lyric orientations—the commitments and relations to the world that emerge aesthetically and tentatively out of language. For instance, ... More

This introductory chapter argues that lyric poetry can create lyric orientations—the commitments and relations to the world that emerge aesthetically and tentatively out of language. For instance, lyric poetry can make political communities, recast human relations to death, or unite the sensual as well as intellectual components of human subjectivity. The book focuses on the works of Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke, who were among the relatively few poets who wrote against dominant discourses that addressed finitude (uncertainty in afterlife, consciousness, etc.). Hölderlin wrote between German idealism and romanticism, while Rilke examined the problems that had been raised by empiricism, aestheticism, and modernism.Less

Animal Minds across Discourse Domains

David Herman

in Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between Literature and Cognition

This chapter seeks to reframe, and move beyond, debates organized around a polarity between legible and illegible animal minds. Instead, it outlines techniques for documenting and analysing the ... More

This chapter seeks to reframe, and move beyond, debates organized around a polarity between legible and illegible animal minds. Instead, it outlines techniques for documenting and analysing the attested range of mind-ascribing practices in a given culture or subculture, as they manifest themselves in narratives about animals—narratives that are anchored in a variety of ‘discourse domains’. It uses this expression as a technical term to refer to frameworks for activity that determine what sorts of ascriptive practices will be deemed appropriate and warranted in a given context, arguing that the norms for ascription associated with such discourse domains cut across the fiction‒non-fiction divide. Synthesizing narratological research on thought presentation with scholarship on animal subjectivity, it argues that domain, not genre, is the key determinant of how prolific and detailed the animal experiences projected by a given narrative will be.Less

The Encounter in Sense and Thought

Ryan J. Johnson

in The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter

This chapter turns to the thorny issues of thought, consciousness, and human subjectivity. As naturalists, Lucretius and Deleuze do not assume the existence of a subject, but instead attempt to ... More

This chapter turns to the thorny issues of thought, consciousness, and human subjectivity. As naturalists, Lucretius and Deleuze do not assume the existence of a subject, but instead attempt to account for the ways in which the subject itself emerges out of the natural world. The task of this chapter is to show how Lucretian atomism and Deleuze account for the production of a thinking and conscious being (a subject) through the violent encounter with simulacra and what Deleuze calls ‘the being of the sensible’. The production of thought and knowledge is hence another instance of actualisation, like all things — albeit this time the result is thinking.Less

Going to Tara via Vienna: Joyce and the Freudian Bildungsroman

Michael G. Cronin

in Impure Thoughts: Sexuality, Catholicism and Literature in Twentieth-Century Ireland

This chapter discusses the emergence of psychoanalytic thought in the twentieth century and the historical development of the notion of sexuality. It examines the Freudian libidinal theory model, ... More

This chapter discusses the emergence of psychoanalytic thought in the twentieth century and the historical development of the notion of sexuality. It examines the Freudian libidinal theory model, which re-conceptualised desire and stated that human subjectivity is produced by a struggle between opposing forces of sexual desire and sexual repression.Less

The Archive

Josef Teboho Ansorge

in Identify and Sort: How Digital Power Changed World Politics

This chapter examines some archival forms which contributed to a standardization of political power and human subjectivity in the international system. One of these forms is the map. It considers the ... More

This chapter examines some archival forms which contributed to a standardization of political power and human subjectivity in the international system. One of these forms is the map. It considers the role of maps in the development of the state system, the stabilization of property relations, as well as colonialism. It then turns to census and statistics. It attempts to locate the role of the colony in the development of such technics of politics, to identify the importance of specialized knowledge (statistics) for such technics, and show how these forms can be used in a new way to legitimate the persecution of previously illegible population groups. The chapter then deals with passports. Out of all of the archival forms discussed here, the passport and the border sites it is evaluated at, are the most frequent manifestations of state power in a modern individual's life. The final section discusses the card registry, a significant breakthrough in information technology for all of the important institutions of modernity: prison, police, hospital, university, government, military, and the borders.Less

Conclusion

Erica Wickerson

in The Architecture of Narrative Time: Thomas Mann and the Problems of Modern Narrative

The Conclusion summarizes the main tenets of the book, which, first, aims to propose a new comprehensive approach to the analysis of time in narrative that takes account both of the linguistic ... More

The Conclusion summarizes the main tenets of the book, which, first, aims to propose a new comprehensive approach to the analysis of time in narrative that takes account both of the linguistic minutiae of a text and its overall plot structure, and that may be applied to any literary work rather than purely to those that problematize the narration of time; and second, to offer new interpretations of several of Mann’s works both in the light of temporal analysis and in terms of his engagement with literature, myth, and history. The Conclusion argues that temporal analysis opens up an empathetic sphere that offers insights into the subjective experience of others more generally. In a world where constant public presence and worldwide accessibility has become the norm, the analysis of time and literature has become ever more critical.Less