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The conclusion presents an overview of the book’s argument and shows how each chapter contributes to the thesis that Loy’s corpus creates a “critical modernism” and various eccentric positions which enable this constantly self-reflexive and critical stance with respect to modernist aesthetics, culture and, partially, politics. By adopting “eccentricity” as a critical concept and instrument, this study suggests that rather than relegating Loy to a marginal corner of modernist scholarship, reserved for those eccentric authors (mostly women), who did not fit the criteria of high modernism, her work should be recognized as writing the possibility of critical gaze into the very heart of the avant-garde and modernist canon.

This chapter investigates the various modes of engagement with Peripatetic knowledge (particularly Peripatetic science) within Plutarch's Table Talk. More specifically, it discussed the narratives within the Table Talk which focus on the recollection of Peripatetic knowledge under conditions of oral communication. The purpose is dual: to assess the role Peripateticism plays as intellectual capital within the work; and to explore the self-reflexive connotations of these scenes for the Table Talk itself, as a text that is cast in the mould of Peripatetic problem-collections. The first part examines the importance of Peripatetic legacy within the Table Talk (and the imperial tradition of miscellanistic writing more generally), particularly its significance as an exponent of an ideal of polymathy. The main part discusses memory and recollection as key factors that determine how Peripatetic knowledge is shared and transmitted within the work. The final part discusses the extent to which the Table Talk might anticipate similar scenarios of transmission for its own contents, by looking closely at aspects of its structure and themes.

This chapter tackles the syntax of self-reflexives. Such reflexives are derived from pronouns by adjoining a self-part to them, which provides them with the syntax of floating quantifiers. This claim is developed in two steps: first, it is shown that self-reflexives share a number of properties with intensifiers (e.g., The headmaster has seen me himself). Second, it is argued that the syntax of such intensifiers closely matches that of floating quantifiers. Finally, the syntax of self-reflexives is shown to be reducible to the syntax of floating quantifiers. Floating quantifiers must c-command its antecedent. So do self-reflexives: they overtly or covertly raise to an adjoined position from which they c-command their antecedents. As probes, they value their φ-features via an Agree relation with the antecedent they c-command. An account is developed for the logophoric uses of self-reflexives.

This chapter extends the analysis. The first extension is to reflexives contained in PPs, which pose a problem for the syntactic analysis developed in Chapters 3 and 4. It is argued that PPs come in two kinds: functional ones and spatial/temporal ones. These occupy different configurational positions in the tree. Both types of PPs show different behaviour with regard to binding of anaphors and pronouns contained in them, due to their different configurational position in the tree. The second issue is that of nonlocal reflexives. These constitute a more recalcitrant problem, left as a matter for further research. Finally, the consequences of the analysis for simplex and complex reflexives in other languages are evaluated. It is argued that French, Italian, German, and Swedish se reflexives are morphologically complex, and can figure in both the configurations of simplex zich and complex zichzelf in Dutch.

Scanning contemporary Arab cinema through the lens of queer studies reveals many films exploring issues of gender identity and sexual difference, and challenging patriarchal culture in the broader context of the struggle for national and social liberation. Chahine's stylistic outlook on his personal experiences, despairs, and anxieties, as well as his hopes and aspirations are reconciled within loosely connected cinematic episodes of fantasy and reality. But the creative, political, and personal struggles of the filmmaker are laid out in a manner unprecedented in world cinema, let alone in Arab cinema. However, Chahine's disclosure of the most intimate of his personal aspirations and anxieties (such as his bisexual fantasies and relations, and his apprehensions of aging) breaks major taboos in the history of self-reflexive cinema.

This chapter argues that Catullus’s poem 64 (a miniature epic or epyllion), though original by modern standards, is shot through with forms of translation that were common at Rome, in particular what we might call generic translation. Frequently the narrative flow of this long poem is paused to lavish attention on items associated with the transfer of culture from East to West. It is argued that these descriptions are self-reflexive moments where the poem probes its own unsettling status as a translation of the Alexandrian epyllion into Latin form. But even as this metapoetic subtext voices apprehension about the poem’s imported status, it poses the poet-translator as a contemporary hero in a belated world where all great deeds have already been done and all great texts have already been written.

This chapter addresses some concerns of British horror cinema with specific reference to an extraordinary proliferation of what Noël Carroll would term ‘fusion monsters’, represented in various films. In each of these highly self-reflexive films a new kind of ‘fusion hero’ can also be seen to emerge: one who undertakes a hybridisation of earlier models of British masculinity in his mission to conquer the monster and become a man. Thus, in new millennial British horror one can also see not only a tendency to parody and pastiche earlier horror texts but a will to explore earlier models of British masculinity—specifically those drawn from Britain's imperial past. As such, attitudes to women are highly significant in each of these films. Thus a new form of masculine identity can be seen to emerge from the ruins: one that is simultaneously hard-hitting and gentle, innovative and steady, decisive and compassionate. British horror of the new millennium not only points to the traumatised nature of the contemporary British male self-image but to the ways in which it is possible to work through the horror and, in so doing, become a new kind of man. Various examples of films are also presented that are indicative of the patterns followed in British cinema.

This chapter discusses Wes Craven's New Nightmare and John Carpenter's In The Mouth of Madness that blurred existing horror cinema and horror literature with reality and pseudo-realities. It analyses how the acknowledgment of both creators and audience within intricate, self-reflexive narratives equally strive to operate as serious, frightening genre films in an age of pastiche and repetition. It also talks about Last Action Hero from 1993 as a higher-profile failure that was conceived by two neophyte writers as a parody of 1980s action films. The chapter examines the icons of horror that formerly dominate the covers of genre bible Fangoria that were fading from public popularity as the 'McDonaldisation of horror'. It describes the fervour to capitalise on the popularity of anti-heroes like Freddy Krueger that led to increasingly campy and gimmicky sequels.

This chapter examines how prayer books represented a particular theology and practice of prayer; they were a crucial part of the material and devotional culture of Anglicanism. By the last decade of the century, Anglicans' sturdy defenses of liturgical prayer, and their concomitant critiques of more self-reflexive prayers, had softened, and their prayerful sensibilities had begun to encompass both traditional liturgy and the more subjective prayer associated with evangelicalism. The most distinctive feature of Anglican devotions of the word was the centrality of the Book of Common Prayer, a book that figured significantly in both Virginians' actual practice of prayer and in their polemics about prayer. Virtually all other surviving evidence in England and New England points to Bibles, not prayer books, being used in courtship rituals.

The book treats Stardust Memories as a sort of Rosetta stone of Allen’s filmography, because this autobiographical text incorporates so many thematic elements recurring in his oeuvre. Protagonist Sandy Bates allows Allen to dramatize his ambivalence about producing comic films when his own emotional weather tends toward drama, his conviction that art accomplishes nothing, and his ambiguous feelings toward his own celebrity. These issues get complicated in Stardust Memories as the recurrent shifts from Sandy Bates’s life to his films begin blurring, landing the viewer in the closing scene perplexed about whether s/he is watching the actresses in Bates’s film or in Allen’s discussing Bates’s/Allen’s kissing techniques and the effectiveness of his movie. Through this entangling of art and life, the influence of 8½ is pervasive in Stardust Memories, but the movie is very much Allen’s own in its projection of his very personal ambivalences about the film art he obsessively produces. In this film, “the movie medium itself is implicated in the confusions that make answering ultimate existential questions so impossible.”

Chapter two focuses ona groundbreaking, self-reflexive episode of Little Sammy Sneeze, a comic which follows a boy whose potent sneezes leave mayhem in his wake. Sammy's sneezes even shatter the frame that contains him, dismantling the divide between viewer and subject. Here McCayexplores time and motion within the narrative space of the comic strip, as well as sneezing as a disruptive social practice, that acts on the body much the way the comic strip interrupts the sober narrative of the newspaper. While employing humor as a strategy for critiquing societal norms, McCay drew upon assorted popular visual art forms, including vaudeville and early film, to create an anarchic response to consumer culture. With Sammy Sneeze and The Story of Hungry Henrietta, McCay was instrumental in creating an audience for comics, by both acclimating them to the visual language of comics, and dismantling these selfsame conventions before their eyes.

This introductory chapter provides an account of scholarly research into amateur cinema as it has developed in the past decade or so, clarifies the structure of the present volume, and points towards specific questions addressed by the selection and grouping of its contributions. In the ‘relational’ spirit of much of the filmmaking involved, the volume considers the work of the ‘small gauge storyteller’ in relation to the study of professional cinema, whilst always underlining the transformation in amateur contexts. For example, when amateurs made films about the commercial sector they could be bitingly satirical, as in Coming Shortly (1954), a burlesque of a cinema trailer advertising that fabulous film that is always ‘Coming Shortly’, and The Bottom of The Barrel (1958) a skit on various styles of professional filmmaking. Similarly, the impulse to turn the camera back on their own filmmaking environment has also gripped the amateur filmmaker over the years, and an exploration of these themes will be the focus of this introductory chapter. Such fiction films indicate generalised attitudes towards the social conditions of the amateur mode of production, and these self-reflexive films are seen as encouraging a sense of recognition and enjoyment by holding a mirror up to participants of amateur cine culture more generally.

Narayan’s last work, Grandmother’s Tale, a novella, tells the story of a determined young woman who goes searching for her husband missing for years. She succeeds in her mission but also encounters unexpected sub-sequences. Narayan’s final book is a good example. Narayan’s ‘telling’ strategy in this novella strikes us. Grandmother’s Tale is Narayan’s contribution to self-reflexive fiction. Towards the end of decades-long career as a storyteller, Narayan attempts to reconstruct in this book the story narrated by his own maternal grandmother Ammani, and also about her mother.

This chapter explores the work of Asian American literature’s matriarch, Maxine Hong Kingston, through her recent work, The Fifth Book of Peace, a book that revises each of her earlier texts and, along with them, the canonical understandings of repetition they have helped establish. As Kingston redirects the self-reflexive, autobiographical writing for which she is best known from a technique for consolidating the ethnic self into one for building cosmopolitan community, she also forwards a new understanding of repetition through the concept of “practice.” Understood as both action in the present and preparation for the future, the idea of “practice” reveals unexpected continuities between the radical 1960s and our institutionalized present, suggesting new ways in which repetition helps us inhabit the impasses of official multiculturalism.

‘Narrative and Play’ continues to evaluate Byron and Shelley’s relationship with an eye to discussing how both poets employ narrative form in ways that create allow a constant cycle of renewal. The chapter examines how both poets explore the justification of art as well as the limits of art. It identifies the deftness with which Byron, in his narrative poems, ‘enthrals and challenges the reader’ by creating characters and circumstances that challenge ethical clarity. His characters are divided against themselves; they often act by reacting rather than drive the narration with a sense of purpose. Shelley’s narrative poem, however, offers ‘something close to virtuosic poetic display’. For all the Romantic emphasis on the ideal, both poets also recognize and place value on what is real. They seek for truth through the imagination, and this chapter examines how each poet does so. The chapter also traces each poet’s capacity for balancing and blending contraries. It includes examination of poetic form in both poems, in this case ottava rima, and the ways in which both poets employ the Italian form. The chapter concludes with a final summing-up of the differing ways in which Shelley and Byron employ narrative form. Byron takes advantage of the infinite possibility in self-multiplying tales and of digression and narratorial presence. Shelley focuses less on the story itself, and more on the compulsion to create stories, which reflects, ultimately, the compulsion to create. Finally, the chapter points out the importance of Byron and Shelley’s poetic works and experiments in narrative form as precursors to postmodernist experimentation.

Plato’s most self-reflexive work offers a conception of philosophy that embodies yet transcends the dialectical. Some of the notorious interpretative puzzles of the Phaedrus arise from failing adequately to recognize that Plato’s portrayal of Socrates as attempting to woo Phaedrus to philosophy, with only partial success, is itself a rhetorical attempt to woo the appropriate reader; so understood, its self-commentaries can be given their appropriate ironic weight. What they bring out is that, in seeking to understand human experience, dialectical method is essentially incomplete. Within the bounds established by dialectic, we need to make our discriminations, at least in part, by means of self-interrogation, conceived not as infallible but as inescapable. In such contexts, it would appear, self-involvement is an integral part of judgement.

To suggest as Chapters 5 to 8 together have done that for the idealist value is both relative to mind and metaphysically foundational to reality itself might seem a contradiction. This chapter is one of the most important in the whole book and explains why, far from being a defect, this duality constitutes the most fundamental and original insight which idealist ethics has to offer. Idealism rejects the traditional opposition between moral realism and moral anti-realism. To be an idealist is precisely to hold that the universe is so constituted that things are real if and only if they are ideal: to hold that uncovering in any item indicators of the work of mind makes that thing more, not less, significant. The notion of the moral self (articulated by both Josiah Royce and Charles Taylor) challenges any simple subjectivism, while consideration of pleasure and of the value of value itself allow us to see the essentially self-reflexive nature of value.

The book’s introductory chapter situates its study of American avant-garde cinema in the context of the field of film-philosophy and the post-theory debates within cinema studies. The chapter rectifies influential misreadings of American avant-garde films by film-philosophers, and goes on to trace philosophy’s influences on the avant-garde, laying the groundwork for putting their films in conversation with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This chapter outlines the various kinds of dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens at work in American avant-garde cinema, and explains the various ways in which American avant-garde filmmakers have used this figure to advance a philosophy that promotes behaviors of re-encounter and review applicable to the off-screen world.