Michael Ostling
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199587902
- eISBN:
- 9780191731228
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587902.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Early Modern History, Social History
Witches are imaginary creatures. But in Poland as in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. This book tells the story ...
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Witches are imaginary creatures. But in Poland as in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. This book tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions, the book also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives. Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of diabolical sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babies uncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self‐imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft the book attempts to explore the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.Less
Witches are imaginary creatures. But in Poland as in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. This book tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions, the book also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives. Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of diabolical sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babies uncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self‐imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft the book attempts to explore the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.
Lorraine Code
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2006
- ISBN:
- 9780195159431
- eISBN:
- 9780199786411
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195159438.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
Arguing that ecological thinking can animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns, this book critiques the instrumental rationality, ...
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Arguing that ecological thinking can animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns, this book critiques the instrumental rationality, hyperbolized autonomy, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated. It proposes a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practices. Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson’s scientific projects, the book draws, constructively and critically, on ecological theory and practice, on (post-Quinean) naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theory. Analyzing extended examples from developmental psychology, from medicine and law, and from circumstances where vulnerability, credibility, and public trust are at issue, the argument addresses the constitutive part played by an instituted social imaginary in shaping and regulating human lives. The practices and examples discussed invoke the responsibility requirements central to this text’s larger purpose of imagining, crafting, articulating a creative, innovative, instituting social imaginary, committed to interrogating entrenched hierarchical social structures, en route to enacting principles of ideal cohabitation.Less
Arguing that ecological thinking can animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns, this book critiques the instrumental rationality, hyperbolized autonomy, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated. It proposes a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practices. Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson’s scientific projects, the book draws, constructively and critically, on ecological theory and practice, on (post-Quinean) naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theory. Analyzing extended examples from developmental psychology, from medicine and law, and from circumstances where vulnerability, credibility, and public trust are at issue, the argument addresses the constitutive part played by an instituted social imaginary in shaping and regulating human lives. The practices and examples discussed invoke the responsibility requirements central to this text’s larger purpose of imagining, crafting, articulating a creative, innovative, instituting social imaginary, committed to interrogating entrenched hierarchical social structures, en route to enacting principles of ideal cohabitation.
Lorraine Code
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2006
- ISBN:
- 9780195159431
- eISBN:
- 9780199786411
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195159438.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
This chapter shows how ecology, literally and metaphorically, affords a model for rethinking the established theories of knowledge, and relations between humanity and the other-than-human, that ...
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This chapter shows how ecology, literally and metaphorically, affords a model for rethinking the established theories of knowledge, and relations between humanity and the other-than-human, that characterize the social imaginary of the post-Enlightenment western world. Ecology figures as a study of habitats where people can live well together; of the ethos and habitus enacted in the customs, social organizations, and creative-regulative principles by which they strive or fail to achieve this end. Focusing on a shift in Rachel Carson’s thinking from geographical to ecological, and drawing on Kristin Shrader-Frechette’s analysis of ecological science, the chapter draws a parallel between Carson’s tacit epistemology and that of biologist Karen Messing to develop the working conception of ecology that informs the argument of the book. A reclamation of testimony as a source of evidence is central to the argument.Less
This chapter shows how ecology, literally and metaphorically, affords a model for rethinking the established theories of knowledge, and relations between humanity and the other-than-human, that characterize the social imaginary of the post-Enlightenment western world. Ecology figures as a study of habitats where people can live well together; of the ethos and habitus enacted in the customs, social organizations, and creative-regulative principles by which they strive or fail to achieve this end. Focusing on a shift in Rachel Carson’s thinking from geographical to ecological, and drawing on Kristin Shrader-Frechette’s analysis of ecological science, the chapter draws a parallel between Carson’s tacit epistemology and that of biologist Karen Messing to develop the working conception of ecology that informs the argument of the book. A reclamation of testimony as a source of evidence is central to the argument.
Lorraine Code
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2006
- ISBN:
- 9780195159431
- eISBN:
- 9780199786411
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195159438.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
Although knowing other people often seems to offer better exemplars of the complexity of knowing than does knowing medium-sized physical objects, the scope and limits of such knowledge need to be ...
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Although knowing other people often seems to offer better exemplars of the complexity of knowing than does knowing medium-sized physical objects, the scope and limits of such knowledge need to be examined. It is unclear how well anyone can imagine/claim to know another person’s experiences, circumstances, situation, feelings; and expressions of empathy are often imperialistic, insensitive, coercive, intrusive. Considering Mark Johnson’s The Moral Imagination, and Marguerite La Caze’s work on the arrogance of the analytic imaginary according to which anyone can, with a little effort, imagine being in someone else’s shoes, this chapter addresses the difficulties of knowing well enough to think responsibly, beyond one’s “own” situation. How might such thinking be possible, and who, specifically, is in a position to claim such knowledge? Issues of vulnerability, both as exposed in the Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1992, and in Susan Brison’s accounts of the aftermath of a brutal rape inform the analysis.Less
Although knowing other people often seems to offer better exemplars of the complexity of knowing than does knowing medium-sized physical objects, the scope and limits of such knowledge need to be examined. It is unclear how well anyone can imagine/claim to know another person’s experiences, circumstances, situation, feelings; and expressions of empathy are often imperialistic, insensitive, coercive, intrusive. Considering Mark Johnson’s The Moral Imagination, and Marguerite La Caze’s work on the arrogance of the analytic imaginary according to which anyone can, with a little effort, imagine being in someone else’s shoes, this chapter addresses the difficulties of knowing well enough to think responsibly, beyond one’s “own” situation. How might such thinking be possible, and who, specifically, is in a position to claim such knowledge? Issues of vulnerability, both as exposed in the Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1992, and in Susan Brison’s accounts of the aftermath of a brutal rape inform the analysis.
David Wengrow
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691159041
- eISBN:
- 9781400848867
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691159041.003.0004
- Subject:
- Archaeology, Historical Archaeology
This chapter considers the case for a much earlier beginning to the composite's story, among the hunter-gatherers and villagers of remote prehistory. It has been suggested that “imaginary animals,” ...
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This chapter considers the case for a much earlier beginning to the composite's story, among the hunter-gatherers and villagers of remote prehistory. It has been suggested that “imaginary animals,” “monsters,” and composite figures are found throughout the Upper Paleolithic art tradition that flourished among hunter-gatherers of the last Ice Age, between around 40,000 and 10,000 years ago. That tradition, or better complex of traditions, is most richly documented across a broad swath of southern Europe, on what were then the fringes of a vast steppe bordering the zone of maximum glaciation. The chapter first examines the frequency of composites among the surviving corpus of Paleolithic art, along with the significance of such images in the ritual life of prehistoric societies, before discussing the development of pictorial art in the later Neolithic of the Near East. It also describes animal figures in predynastic Egypt.Less
This chapter considers the case for a much earlier beginning to the composite's story, among the hunter-gatherers and villagers of remote prehistory. It has been suggested that “imaginary animals,” “monsters,” and composite figures are found throughout the Upper Paleolithic art tradition that flourished among hunter-gatherers of the last Ice Age, between around 40,000 and 10,000 years ago. That tradition, or better complex of traditions, is most richly documented across a broad swath of southern Europe, on what were then the fringes of a vast steppe bordering the zone of maximum glaciation. The chapter first examines the frequency of composites among the surviving corpus of Paleolithic art, along with the significance of such images in the ritual life of prehistoric societies, before discussing the development of pictorial art in the later Neolithic of the Near East. It also describes animal figures in predynastic Egypt.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This shorter chapter is a coda considering the afterlife of modernism's engagements with life‐writings covered in Part II. It begins by sketching how the ideas traced in this study of imaginary ...
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This shorter chapter is a coda considering the afterlife of modernism's engagements with life‐writings covered in Part II. It begins by sketching how the ideas traced in this study of imaginary portraiture, imaginary self‐portraiture, and aesthetic autobiography figure in experiments in life‐writing by two authors coming after modernism: Jean‐Paul Sartre in Les Mots, and Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory. The second section sketches ways in which postmodernism has drawn upon and extended the tradition of experimentations with life‐writing. Here the emphasis is on metafictional strategies, especially those of auto/biografiction and imaginary authorship. Auto/biografiction can be understood as a strand of what Linda Hutcheon defines as ‘historiographic metafiction’, focusing on the representations of individual life stories rather than on representations of historical crises or trauma. Modernist works explicitly thematizing their own processes of representation (such as Orlando or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) are reconsidered as pioneers of the postmodern development that might be termed ‘auto/biographic metafiction’. Key examples discussed are A. S. Byatt's Possession (as biographic metafiction); Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (as autobiographic metafiction) and Nabokov's Pale Fire (as auto/biographic metafiction). Where historiographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of the historical novel, auto/biographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of auto/biography.Less
This shorter chapter is a coda considering the afterlife of modernism's engagements with life‐writings covered in Part II. It begins by sketching how the ideas traced in this study of imaginary portraiture, imaginary self‐portraiture, and aesthetic autobiography figure in experiments in life‐writing by two authors coming after modernism: Jean‐Paul Sartre in Les Mots, and Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory. The second section sketches ways in which postmodernism has drawn upon and extended the tradition of experimentations with life‐writing. Here the emphasis is on metafictional strategies, especially those of auto/biografiction and imaginary authorship. Auto/biografiction can be understood as a strand of what Linda Hutcheon defines as ‘historiographic metafiction’, focusing on the representations of individual life stories rather than on representations of historical crises or trauma. Modernist works explicitly thematizing their own processes of representation (such as Orlando or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) are reconsidered as pioneers of the postmodern development that might be termed ‘auto/biographic metafiction’. Key examples discussed are A. S. Byatt's Possession (as biographic metafiction); Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (as autobiographic metafiction) and Nabokov's Pale Fire (as auto/biographic metafiction). Where historiographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of the historical novel, auto/biographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of auto/biography.
MARJORIE TAYLOR, STEPHANIE M. CARLSON, and ALISON B. SHAWBER
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197264195
- eISBN:
- 9780191734540
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197264195.003.0004
- Subject:
- Psychology, Cognitive Psychology
This chapter discusses children’s private role play with imaginary companions and playmates which the children created and interacted with and/or talked about regularly. Although imaginary companions ...
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This chapter discusses children’s private role play with imaginary companions and playmates which the children created and interacted with and/or talked about regularly. Although imaginary companions are at times integrated into play with other children or family members, this type of role play in general occurs within a solitary context. Imaginary companions are interesting as they provide information on social and cognitive development. For instance, relationships formed by children with their imaginary companion offer a glimpse of the child’s concept of friendship and how it functions. In this chapter, explanations of why some children create imaginary companions with negative characteristics are considered. It discusses how studies of negative imaginary companions of children has the potential of providing fresh information on the distinction between automatic and controlled processes in consciousness and the relation between inhibitory play and pretend play.Less
This chapter discusses children’s private role play with imaginary companions and playmates which the children created and interacted with and/or talked about regularly. Although imaginary companions are at times integrated into play with other children or family members, this type of role play in general occurs within a solitary context. Imaginary companions are interesting as they provide information on social and cognitive development. For instance, relationships formed by children with their imaginary companion offer a glimpse of the child’s concept of friendship and how it functions. In this chapter, explanations of why some children create imaginary companions with negative characteristics are considered. It discusses how studies of negative imaginary companions of children has the potential of providing fresh information on the distinction between automatic and controlled processes in consciousness and the relation between inhibitory play and pretend play.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; ...
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This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; especially her father's Dictionary of National Biography; the influence of Freud on Bloomsbury; Woolf's own critical discussions of biography; and New Criticism's antagonism to biographical interpretation; though it also draws on recent biographical criticism of Woolf. It discusses Jacob's Room and Flush, but concentrates on Orlando, arguing that it draws on the notions of imaginary and composite portraits discussed earlier. Whereas Orlando is often read as a ‘debunking’ of an obtuse biographer‐narrator, it shows how Woolf's aims are much more complex. First, the book's historical range is alert to the historical development of biography; and that the narrator is no more fixed than Orlando, but transforms with each epoch. Second, towards the ending the narrator begins to sound curiously like Lytton Strachey, himself the arch‐debunker of Victorian biographical piety. Thus Orlando is read as both example and parody of what Woolf called ‘The New Biography’. The chapter reads Woolf in parallel with Harold Nicolson's The Development of English Biography, and also his book Some People—a text whose imaginary (self)portraiture provoked her discussion of ‘The New Biography’ as well as contributing to the conception of Orlando.Less
This chapter focuses on the British modernist whose work represents the most sustained fictionalising engagement with biography. It recounts changes in biographical theory in Woolf's lifetime; especially her father's Dictionary of National Biography; the influence of Freud on Bloomsbury; Woolf's own critical discussions of biography; and New Criticism's antagonism to biographical interpretation; though it also draws on recent biographical criticism of Woolf. It discusses Jacob's Room and Flush, but concentrates on Orlando, arguing that it draws on the notions of imaginary and composite portraits discussed earlier. Whereas Orlando is often read as a ‘debunking’ of an obtuse biographer‐narrator, it shows how Woolf's aims are much more complex. First, the book's historical range is alert to the historical development of biography; and that the narrator is no more fixed than Orlando, but transforms with each epoch. Second, towards the ending the narrator begins to sound curiously like Lytton Strachey, himself the arch‐debunker of Victorian biographical piety. Thus Orlando is read as both example and parody of what Woolf called ‘The New Biography’. The chapter reads Woolf in parallel with Harold Nicolson's The Development of English Biography, and also his book Some People—a text whose imaginary (self)portraiture provoked her discussion of ‘The New Biography’ as well as contributing to the conception of Orlando.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter develops the earlier discussions of life‐writings by fictional narrators to consider sustained acts of creative impersonation: works entirely (or almost entirely) presented as written by ...
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This chapter develops the earlier discussions of life‐writings by fictional narrators to consider sustained acts of creative impersonation: works entirely (or almost entirely) presented as written by imaginary authors. It discusses Fernando Pessoa's practice of heteronymity. In this context a surprising reading of Joyce's Portrait is proposed, building on the presence in the work of Stephen Dedalus' writings (poem, journal etc.), to suggest that the entire book might be read as not just a case of free indirect style, with Joyce rendering Stephen's consciousness, but as possibly Joyce's impersonation of the autobiographical book Stephen might have written. Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno is proposed as a comparable example of a fictionally authored self‐portrait.Less
This chapter develops the earlier discussions of life‐writings by fictional narrators to consider sustained acts of creative impersonation: works entirely (or almost entirely) presented as written by imaginary authors. It discusses Fernando Pessoa's practice of heteronymity. In this context a surprising reading of Joyce's Portrait is proposed, building on the presence in the work of Stephen Dedalus' writings (poem, journal etc.), to suggest that the entire book might be read as not just a case of free indirect style, with Joyce rendering Stephen's consciousness, but as possibly Joyce's impersonation of the autobiographical book Stephen might have written. Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno is proposed as a comparable example of a fictionally authored self‐portrait.
James Davison Hunter
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199730803
- eISBN:
- 9780199777082
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730803.003.0013
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
Politics has become a “social imaginary” that defines the horizon of understanding and the parameters for action. What is never challenged is the proclivity to think of the Christian faith and its ...
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Politics has become a “social imaginary” that defines the horizon of understanding and the parameters for action. What is never challenged is the proclivity to think of the Christian faith and its engagements with culture in political terms. For all, the public has been conflated with the political. But the ressentiment that marks the way they operate makes it clear that a crucial part of what motivates politics is a will to dominate. However, for politics to be about more than power, it depends upon a realm that is independent of the political process. The deepest irony is that the Christian faith has the possibility of autonomous institutions and practices that could be a source of ideals and values that could elevate politics to more than a quest for power. Instead, by nurturing its resentments, they become functional Nietzcheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive to resist.Less
Politics has become a “social imaginary” that defines the horizon of understanding and the parameters for action. What is never challenged is the proclivity to think of the Christian faith and its engagements with culture in political terms. For all, the public has been conflated with the political. But the ressentiment that marks the way they operate makes it clear that a crucial part of what motivates politics is a will to dominate. However, for politics to be about more than power, it depends upon a realm that is independent of the political process. The deepest irony is that the Christian faith has the possibility of autonomous institutions and practices that could be a source of ideals and values that could elevate politics to more than a quest for power. Instead, by nurturing its resentments, they become functional Nietzcheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive to resist.
Joseph E. Davis
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226686547
- eISBN:
- 9780226686714
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226686714.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Health, Illness, and Medicine
For a generation, an intense debate has been waged over the expanding number of people who are diagnosed with a mental disorder and treated with prescription drugs such as Prozac and Adderall. One ...
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For a generation, an intense debate has been waged over the expanding number of people who are diagnosed with a mental disorder and treated with prescription drugs such as Prozac and Adderall. One side, the psychiatric, sees progress. People suffering from mental illness are finally getting the treatment they need. The other side challenges the psychiatric perspective and the medicalization and treatment of common personality traits and forms of distress as mental disorders. Neither side has much to say about how people themselves explain their suffering and or envision a resolution. Chemically Imbalanced, based on interviews, explores this sense-making among people dealing with experiences of loss, disappointment, and underachievement. At the heart of distress is a gap between experience and valued standards and ideals of selfhood, and confusion over why things are not going as they should. People are in a predicament, and the book explores how many take up diagnostic categories, biological explanations, and pharmaceuticals as social objects and narratives to make sense of their situation and ameliorate it. These efforts reveal that a quiet but profound revolution in consciousness is underway. Ways of conceiving of suffering in terms of the mind, interpersonal experience, and social circumstances are being replaced with a thin and mechanistic language of the body/brain. The appeal of this “neurobiological imaginary,” the book argues, is not its explanatory power but in what it promises people they can be in our fluid and depthless culture. Despite the vaunted freedom, the imaginary has troubling and entrapping consequences.Less
For a generation, an intense debate has been waged over the expanding number of people who are diagnosed with a mental disorder and treated with prescription drugs such as Prozac and Adderall. One side, the psychiatric, sees progress. People suffering from mental illness are finally getting the treatment they need. The other side challenges the psychiatric perspective and the medicalization and treatment of common personality traits and forms of distress as mental disorders. Neither side has much to say about how people themselves explain their suffering and or envision a resolution. Chemically Imbalanced, based on interviews, explores this sense-making among people dealing with experiences of loss, disappointment, and underachievement. At the heart of distress is a gap between experience and valued standards and ideals of selfhood, and confusion over why things are not going as they should. People are in a predicament, and the book explores how many take up diagnostic categories, biological explanations, and pharmaceuticals as social objects and narratives to make sense of their situation and ameliorate it. These efforts reveal that a quiet but profound revolution in consciousness is underway. Ways of conceiving of suffering in terms of the mind, interpersonal experience, and social circumstances are being replaced with a thin and mechanistic language of the body/brain. The appeal of this “neurobiological imaginary,” the book argues, is not its explanatory power but in what it promises people they can be in our fluid and depthless culture. Despite the vaunted freedom, the imaginary has troubling and entrapping consequences.
Manfred B. Steger
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199286942
- eISBN:
- 9780191700408
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199286942.003.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
Ideology is a loaded word with a checkered past and most people today regard it as a form of dogmatic thinking or political manipulation. Virtually no one associates it with analytic clarity or ...
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Ideology is a loaded word with a checkered past and most people today regard it as a form of dogmatic thinking or political manipulation. Virtually no one associates it with analytic clarity or scientific rigor. Moving beyond the invective, this book considers ideology as evolving and malleable political belief systems that emerged during the American and French Revolutions and competed with religious doctrines over what ideas and values should guide human communities. Surprisingly, however, new treatments of nationality and nationalism appearing on the academic scene since the early 1980s have advanced convincing arguments in favor of a tight connection between the forces of modernity, the spread of industrial capitalism, and the elite-engineered construction of national community as a cultural artifact.Less
Ideology is a loaded word with a checkered past and most people today regard it as a form of dogmatic thinking or political manipulation. Virtually no one associates it with analytic clarity or scientific rigor. Moving beyond the invective, this book considers ideology as evolving and malleable political belief systems that emerged during the American and French Revolutions and competed with religious doctrines over what ideas and values should guide human communities. Surprisingly, however, new treatments of nationality and nationalism appearing on the academic scene since the early 1980s have advanced convincing arguments in favor of a tight connection between the forces of modernity, the spread of industrial capitalism, and the elite-engineered construction of national community as a cultural artifact.
Vanessa Agnew
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195336665
- eISBN:
- 9780199868544
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195336665.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Ancient beliefs in the power of music gained urgency during the mid to late 18th century. The period saw an efflorescence of Orpheus-themed musical works, including operas by Gluck, Mozart, and ...
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Ancient beliefs in the power of music gained urgency during the mid to late 18th century. The period saw an efflorescence of Orpheus-themed musical works, including operas by Gluck, Mozart, and Haydn. Orpheus as archmusician also emerged as a key trope in aesthetic, literary, critical, and historical thought. Yet this widespread interest in musical utility (called Orphic discourse) seems to conflict with the notion of aesthetic autonomy that emerged around the same time. The confluence of these apparently antithetical positions casts doubt on the widespread view that there was an aesthetic-philosophical break between the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead, this book exposes the hidden instrumentality that is typically disavowed by aesthetic disinterest and concludes that musical utility is a site of discursive continuity within modernity. Focusing on the English traveler and music historian Charles Burney's 1772 journey through the Netherlands and central Europe — soon to be the home of aesthetic autonomy — the book examines the scholarly discussions and social practices that characterize the Enlightenment as an age of Orpheus. It argues that aesthetic autonomy went hand in hand with the late 18th-century insistence on music's moral, social, and political utility. It argues that the foregrounding of alterity, like the new historicization of music, arose within the context of the late 18th century's increased mobility and its burgeoning cross-cultural encounters. The traveler's exposure to new listeners and new musical vernaculars posed critical challenges to classical ideas about what music could do. Understanding the broader function of Orphic discourse thus necessitates a transnational approach that coheres with the cosmopolitan character of serious music and music scholarship. Such an approach exposes the ways in which Orphic discourse made claims about music acting at the margins in order to promote specific class, professional, and national interests.Less
Ancient beliefs in the power of music gained urgency during the mid to late 18th century. The period saw an efflorescence of Orpheus-themed musical works, including operas by Gluck, Mozart, and Haydn. Orpheus as archmusician also emerged as a key trope in aesthetic, literary, critical, and historical thought. Yet this widespread interest in musical utility (called Orphic discourse) seems to conflict with the notion of aesthetic autonomy that emerged around the same time. The confluence of these apparently antithetical positions casts doubt on the widespread view that there was an aesthetic-philosophical break between the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead, this book exposes the hidden instrumentality that is typically disavowed by aesthetic disinterest and concludes that musical utility is a site of discursive continuity within modernity. Focusing on the English traveler and music historian Charles Burney's 1772 journey through the Netherlands and central Europe — soon to be the home of aesthetic autonomy — the book examines the scholarly discussions and social practices that characterize the Enlightenment as an age of Orpheus. It argues that aesthetic autonomy went hand in hand with the late 18th-century insistence on music's moral, social, and political utility. It argues that the foregrounding of alterity, like the new historicization of music, arose within the context of the late 18th century's increased mobility and its burgeoning cross-cultural encounters. The traveler's exposure to new listeners and new musical vernaculars posed critical challenges to classical ideas about what music could do. Understanding the broader function of Orphic discourse thus necessitates a transnational approach that coheres with the cosmopolitan character of serious music and music scholarship. Such an approach exposes the ways in which Orphic discourse made claims about music acting at the margins in order to promote specific class, professional, and national interests.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book explores how writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life‐writing — biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal — increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It ...
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This book explores how writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life‐writing — biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal — increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It argues for an upsurge in new hybrid forms — identified in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 (which provides a key term) as ‘autobiografiction’. Examples include ‘Mark Rutherford’, Gissing, Samuel Butler, Gosse, and A. C. Benson. The book offers a taxonomy of their extraordinary variety, showing how they arose as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography. It argues that a group of concepts, forms, and tropes regularly co‐exist: portraiture, imaginary portraits, collections of such portraits; and (because they are often of imaginary artists) imaginary works of art and literature. Autobiografiction also sheds strong light on modernism. Modernism is often characterized as a movement of ‘impersonality' — a rejection of auto/biography — but most of its major works engage in profound ways with questions of life‐writing. The second part looks at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as impressionism turns into modernism, and consists of detailed readings of Joyce, Stein, Pound, Woolf, and others, and juxtaposing their work with contemporaries whose experiments with life‐writing forms are no less striking. It argues that connecting modernist games with auto/biography and the ‘New Biography’ with their turn‐of‐the‐century precursors allows them to be understood in a new way. A coda considers the after‐life of these experiments in postmodern fiction. A conclusion considers the theoretical implications developed throughout, and argues that ‘autobiografiction’ can also shed light on under‐theorized questions such as what we mean by ‘autobiographical’ and the relations between autobiography and fiction.Less
This book explores how writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life‐writing — biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal — increasingly for the purposes of fiction. It argues for an upsurge in new hybrid forms — identified in a surprisingly early essay of 1906 (which provides a key term) as ‘autobiografiction’. Examples include ‘Mark Rutherford’, Gissing, Samuel Butler, Gosse, and A. C. Benson. The book offers a taxonomy of their extraordinary variety, showing how they arose as the pressures of secularization and psychological theory disturbed the categories of biography and autobiography. It argues that a group of concepts, forms, and tropes regularly co‐exist: portraiture, imaginary portraits, collections of such portraits; and (because they are often of imaginary artists) imaginary works of art and literature. Autobiografiction also sheds strong light on modernism. Modernism is often characterized as a movement of ‘impersonality' — a rejection of auto/biography — but most of its major works engage in profound ways with questions of life‐writing. The second part looks at writers experimenting further with autobiografiction as impressionism turns into modernism, and consists of detailed readings of Joyce, Stein, Pound, Woolf, and others, and juxtaposing their work with contemporaries whose experiments with life‐writing forms are no less striking. It argues that connecting modernist games with auto/biography and the ‘New Biography’ with their turn‐of‐the‐century precursors allows them to be understood in a new way. A coda considers the after‐life of these experiments in postmodern fiction. A conclusion considers the theoretical implications developed throughout, and argues that ‘autobiografiction’ can also shed light on under‐theorized questions such as what we mean by ‘autobiographical’ and the relations between autobiography and fiction.
Mike Savage
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199587650
- eISBN:
- 9780191740626
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199587650.003.0004
- Subject:
- Sociology, Comparative and Historical Sociology
This chapter examines the emergence of the so-called technical identity in Great Britain in 1954. It argues that the changing relations between the middle and working classes encouraged amongst the ...
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This chapter examines the emergence of the so-called technical identity in Great Britain in 1954. It argues that the changing relations between the middle and working classes encouraged amongst the former both a rejection of the gentlemanly embrace, which was seen to be out of keeping with the meritocratic tenor of post-war Britain, and a new interest in rational planning, which was to prove receptive to the social sciences. The chapter contends that the social sciences were shaped by a managerial concern, strongly indebted to cultures of war, mobilization, and demobilization, and suggests that the social sciences did not merely respond to a changing external environment but are themselves implicated in new forms of governmentality, regulation, and social imaginary.Less
This chapter examines the emergence of the so-called technical identity in Great Britain in 1954. It argues that the changing relations between the middle and working classes encouraged amongst the former both a rejection of the gentlemanly embrace, which was seen to be out of keeping with the meritocratic tenor of post-war Britain, and a new interest in rational planning, which was to prove receptive to the social sciences. The chapter contends that the social sciences were shaped by a managerial concern, strongly indebted to cultures of war, mobilization, and demobilization, and suggests that the social sciences did not merely respond to a changing external environment but are themselves implicated in new forms of governmentality, regulation, and social imaginary.
John Wharton Lowe
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469628882
- eISBN:
- 9781469628059
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469628882.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
John Lowe explodes old notions of region by exploring the effect of the Caribbean on Southern literature, and conversely, how the writers of the coastal U.S. have influenced artists “South of the ...
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John Lowe explodes old notions of region by exploring the effect of the Caribbean on Southern literature, and conversely, how the writers of the coastal U.S. have influenced artists “South of the South.” Two chapters consider how armed conflict - the Haitian Revolution and the U.S. Mexican War - created a new awareness of the South as the northern rim of the Caribbean. Other chapters pair writers whose works map out the “Caribbean Imaginary” (Martin Delany and Lucy Holcombe Pickens); the idea of the “transnational South (Constance Fenimore Woolson and Lafcadio Hearn); common folk cultures (Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston); and overlapping narratives of resistance (Richard Wright and George Lamming). The final chapter insists on the inclusion of Cuban American writers in the canon of Southern literature, while demonstrating their importance to the emerging concept of the circumCaribbean. Employing key critics of Caribbean and post-colonial literature, such as Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Franz Fanon, Wilson Harris, Valerie Loichot, J. Michael Dash, Aimé Césaire, and Edward Said, Lowe’s reading are contextualized with hemispheric history, especially that of Cuba, Haiti, Barbados, Jamaica, Mexico, Louisiana, and Florida. His readings revolve around innovative concepts of the Caribbean imaginary and the tropical sublime, and interrogate recent critical categories, such as diaspora, the Black Atlantic, and new approaches to colonialism and post-colonialism. Calypso Magnolia contributes a striking reconfiguration of the “New Southern Studies,” the global South, and hemispheric and Atlantic Studies.Less
John Lowe explodes old notions of region by exploring the effect of the Caribbean on Southern literature, and conversely, how the writers of the coastal U.S. have influenced artists “South of the South.” Two chapters consider how armed conflict - the Haitian Revolution and the U.S. Mexican War - created a new awareness of the South as the northern rim of the Caribbean. Other chapters pair writers whose works map out the “Caribbean Imaginary” (Martin Delany and Lucy Holcombe Pickens); the idea of the “transnational South (Constance Fenimore Woolson and Lafcadio Hearn); common folk cultures (Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston); and overlapping narratives of resistance (Richard Wright and George Lamming). The final chapter insists on the inclusion of Cuban American writers in the canon of Southern literature, while demonstrating their importance to the emerging concept of the circumCaribbean. Employing key critics of Caribbean and post-colonial literature, such as Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Franz Fanon, Wilson Harris, Valerie Loichot, J. Michael Dash, Aimé Césaire, and Edward Said, Lowe’s reading are contextualized with hemispheric history, especially that of Cuba, Haiti, Barbados, Jamaica, Mexico, Louisiana, and Florida. His readings revolve around innovative concepts of the Caribbean imaginary and the tropical sublime, and interrogate recent critical categories, such as diaspora, the Black Atlantic, and new approaches to colonialism and post-colonialism. Calypso Magnolia contributes a striking reconfiguration of the “New Southern Studies,” the global South, and hemispheric and Atlantic Studies.
Nicholas Copeland
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781501736056
- eISBN:
- 9781501736070
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501736056.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Political History
What forces hinder decolonization efforts on the neoliberal terrain? In the aftermath of a genocidal scorched earth campaign, Mayas in the town of San Pedro Necta encountered a formidable ...
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What forces hinder decolonization efforts on the neoliberal terrain? In the aftermath of a genocidal scorched earth campaign, Mayas in the town of San Pedro Necta encountered a formidable democracy-development machine designed to displace radical class politics into private market advancement and local, indigenous-led electoral politics. Sampedranos regarded neoliberal democracy and development not as empty, depoliticized forms or colonial impositions, but as hard-won victories that met immediate needs and echoed revolutionary and local struggles. This historical ethnography examines how these governmentalized spaces fell short, simultaneously enabling and disfiguring an ethnic resurgence that fractured in a dispiriting atmosphere of pessimism, self-interest, deception, and mistrust. These dynamics fueled authoritarian populism but also radical reimaginings of democracy and development from below. These findings shed new light on rural politics in Guatemala and across neoliberal and post-conflict settings.Less
What forces hinder decolonization efforts on the neoliberal terrain? In the aftermath of a genocidal scorched earth campaign, Mayas in the town of San Pedro Necta encountered a formidable democracy-development machine designed to displace radical class politics into private market advancement and local, indigenous-led electoral politics. Sampedranos regarded neoliberal democracy and development not as empty, depoliticized forms or colonial impositions, but as hard-won victories that met immediate needs and echoed revolutionary and local struggles. This historical ethnography examines how these governmentalized spaces fell short, simultaneously enabling and disfiguring an ethnic resurgence that fractured in a dispiriting atmosphere of pessimism, self-interest, deception, and mistrust. These dynamics fueled authoritarian populism but also radical reimaginings of democracy and development from below. These findings shed new light on rural politics in Guatemala and across neoliberal and post-conflict settings.
Rahul Rao
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199560370
- eISBN:
- 9780191721694
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199560370.003.0004
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory, International Relations and Politics
The intermezzo explains the relationship between Parts I and II of the book and the methodological shifts entailed in this transition. Part I makes a normative case for protest sensibilities that are ...
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The intermezzo explains the relationship between Parts I and II of the book and the methodological shifts entailed in this transition. Part I makes a normative case for protest sensibilities that are critical of hegemonic understandings and practices of both cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. Beginning from the premise that attitudes towards boundaries are predicated on assumptions about the locus of threats to vital interests, Part I demonstrates that hegemonic understandings of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism are underpinned by simplistic imaginaries of threat that offer plausible but partial inventories of the sources of threats to human rights. In contrast, the political thinkers and activists studied in Part II adopt more complex assumptions about the locus of such threats, recognizing that threats to human rights emanate from outside and within the state and from the state itself. This recognition induces them to occupy a space between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in their thinking about the meaning of boundaries.Less
The intermezzo explains the relationship between Parts I and II of the book and the methodological shifts entailed in this transition. Part I makes a normative case for protest sensibilities that are critical of hegemonic understandings and practices of both cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. Beginning from the premise that attitudes towards boundaries are predicated on assumptions about the locus of threats to vital interests, Part I demonstrates that hegemonic understandings of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism are underpinned by simplistic imaginaries of threat that offer plausible but partial inventories of the sources of threats to human rights. In contrast, the political thinkers and activists studied in Part II adopt more complex assumptions about the locus of such threats, recognizing that threats to human rights emanate from outside and within the state and from the state itself. This recognition induces them to occupy a space between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in their thinking about the meaning of boundaries.
Enda Delaney
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199276677
- eISBN:
- 9780191707674
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199276677.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter charts the initial responses of the migrating Irish to the new environment as well as the ambiguous position of the Irish within the broader social landscape of post-war Britain. Few ...
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This chapter charts the initial responses of the migrating Irish to the new environment as well as the ambiguous position of the Irish within the broader social landscape of post-war Britain. Few Irish migrants possessed illusions of Britain as an El Dorado. Preconceptions were formed well in advance of leaving home. It was most certainly not seen as the promised land of biblical imagery, and expectations of life in this ‘strange land’ were invariably formed by the wider cultural milieu of independent Ireland. The view that the Irish were an element of British society, yet still somehow on the margins, was an all-pervasive one. This ‘strange land’ with its unfamiliar physical landscape would never be ‘home’, and even after decades living in Britain the vision of return and ultimate redemption remained a defining feature of the social imaginary.Less
This chapter charts the initial responses of the migrating Irish to the new environment as well as the ambiguous position of the Irish within the broader social landscape of post-war Britain. Few Irish migrants possessed illusions of Britain as an El Dorado. Preconceptions were formed well in advance of leaving home. It was most certainly not seen as the promised land of biblical imagery, and expectations of life in this ‘strange land’ were invariably formed by the wider cultural milieu of independent Ireland. The view that the Irish were an element of British society, yet still somehow on the margins, was an all-pervasive one. This ‘strange land’ with its unfamiliar physical landscape would never be ‘home’, and even after decades living in Britain the vision of return and ultimate redemption remained a defining feature of the social imaginary.
C. Kavin Rowe
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195377873
- eISBN:
- 9780199869459
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195377873.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Early Christian Studies
Reading Acts as lively political theology in its time necessarily raises questions that directly relate to several crucial contemporary problems. Indeed, the argument is that engaging Acts in this ...
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Reading Acts as lively political theology in its time necessarily raises questions that directly relate to several crucial contemporary problems. Indeed, the argument is that engaging Acts in this way offers significant resources on which modern thinkers can draw to understand conflicts that arise in light of profoundly different schemes of life. “God,” “tolerance,” “diversity,” “culture,” and “religious violence” are words that explicitly point to issues requiring sustained and refined reflection in the 21st century. After a condensed exposition of the reading of Acts given in Chapters 2 through 4, therefore, this final chapter pursues several critical questions that attend the interrelation between claims to universal truth about God and the politics they produce (e.g., the nature of religious truth, the relation between normative truth claims and tolerance of the religious other, the political significance of polytheism, etc.).Less
Reading Acts as lively political theology in its time necessarily raises questions that directly relate to several crucial contemporary problems. Indeed, the argument is that engaging Acts in this way offers significant resources on which modern thinkers can draw to understand conflicts that arise in light of profoundly different schemes of life. “God,” “tolerance,” “diversity,” “culture,” and “religious violence” are words that explicitly point to issues requiring sustained and refined reflection in the 21st century. After a condensed exposition of the reading of Acts given in Chapters 2 through 4, therefore, this final chapter pursues several critical questions that attend the interrelation between claims to universal truth about God and the politics they produce (e.g., the nature of religious truth, the relation between normative truth claims and tolerance of the religious other, the political significance of polytheism, etc.).
