Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Presentation Review: Civilization and the Discontented by Christopher Bollas
Get PDFA message from Los Angeles – the city of angels. Angels visit humans at times of crucial intervention and this YouTube presentation by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas certainly had an impact on my understanding of our current situation of potential collapse in the time of neoliberalism, climate change and the virus Covid-19. He may be familiar to art therapists through his book ‘The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known’ (1987), which explores some of the non-verbal aspects of human experience through an object relations lens
An Experiment inside an Experiment: Improvements in First World War Tank Wireless Communications
Get PDFDuring the First World War, new mobile fighting platforms, including aeroplanes and tanks, presented novel problems for an Army reliant on visual and line communication. Wireless was considered unwieldy, unreliable and non-secure. Unit War Diaries for Tank Signal Companies show only tentative and limited success for early experiments with wireless, with most researchers focusing on the small number of messages sent. This article re-evaluates this picture, balancing what were, indeed, limited achievements in message-carrying, against the rapid development of sound, highly effective radio procedures still recognisable today. Inverting the traditional focus on command decisions, the article strives to illuminate the achievements of those actually operating the equipment
Timothy Bowman, William Butler and Michael Wheatley, The Disparity of Sacrifice: Irish Recruitment to the British Armed Forces, 1914-1918
Get PDFBrandon M Schechter, The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects
Get PDFWomen, Morality and Materiality: Performing Transgression Through Dress and Décor in Fin de Siècle Theatre
Get PDFFrom the fussy and disordered rocaille of the neo-Louis XV style to the swirling and luxuriant ‘modern style’, lustful and deviant women on the theatrical stage in mid- to late nineteenth-century London and Paris merge with the materiality around them: they wear lavish dresses, and perform on sets crowded with furniture, trinkets, baubles, and ostentatious objects. In both Le Demi-monde (1851) and in Les Demi-vierges (1900), breaking the seemly decorum of social gender roles is materialised by flashy interiors according to the latest excessive fashion. Moreover, the dazzlingly overdressed women interact with the proliferating objects of their nouveau riche interiors, invading rooms that are not usually dedicated to them: living rooms, lounges, smoking rooms. Their social involvement is thereby spoofed, caricatured, and reduced to a failed attempt to mimic the high class, as well as the men who rejected them. The stereotype of a decadent materialism is emphasised through the xenophobic scope: in London, representations of French women\u27s interiors in vaudeville or musical comedies go hand in hand with allusions to prostitution and an immoderate luxury taste. On the other hand, in Paris, the ‘modern-style’ or the ‘decadent costume’ can be associated with the Aesthetes from the other side of the Channel. Foreign, excessive and feminine, scenery and dress intertwined to create the material environment of decadence on stage: an eccentric behaviour both condemned and displayed as an appealing consumable product for both women and men of the audience. 
Intertextual London: Empire in the Occult Cosmopolis of Arthur Machen’s N
Get PDFIn Arthur Machen’s novella N (1935), three elderly twentieth-century city-trotters – Perrott, Harliss, and Arnold – reminisce on a wintry night about the London of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their conversation weaves the material remainders of the city’s old streets, shops, and gardens together with literary bric-a-brac from the past. They venture into London’s past with the help of textual representations by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. This is a strikingly intertextual, literary London formed from neoclassical, Romantic and Victorian literary snippets. The temporal differences among these texts are overcome in terms of their spatial unity, evoking the longue durée of literary London. While London remains the focal point of this intertextual maze, the itinerants blur its spatial outlines in their mind-walks: the streets at the outer edges of London resemble the colonial frontier and a nondescript park at Stoke Newington acquires the contours of an oriental garden. What is revealed in their walks is the symbolic spatial structure of the intertextual city that marks the colonies as the uncanny double of London. In Machen’s text, the colonial spaces are not particularized. Rather, the references to Jamaica, China, or India coalesce into a spatial ‘Other’ of London, a symbolic outside residing within the city
Baudelaire and Transparency
Get PDFIn an unpublished text on La Fanfarlo in 2011, I analysed the decadence of the paratheatrical spaces central to the novel, namely the boudoirs. Published in 1847, the novel followed others of the July Monarchy which broke with traditional representations of the backstage, thereafter centralizing society’s opaque mechanics – including class mobility – within hidden and ‘overexploited’, theatrical environments.[i] In La Fanfarlo, a writer operates a calculated press campaign which eventually permits him access to the title character. The reversal of both protagonists’ opinions occurs in paratheatrical spaces: while La Fanfarlo breaks into tears immediately upon sight of her worst critic in a dressing room, an enthralled Cramer spends several evenings watching her performance ‘like a Turk on opium’[ii] in his theatre box.
[i] Jean-Claude Yon, ‘La critique au crayon: L’exemple de La Vie Parisienne,’ in Le miel et le fiel, ed. by Mariane Bury and Hélène Laplace-Claverie (Paris: PUPS, 2008), pp. 73-74. All translations are my own.
[ii] Charles Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), pp. 59-63. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text
Jeremy A Crang, Sisters in Arms: Women in the British Armed Forces during the Second World War
Get PDFNapoleonic Conscription in Indre-et-Loire 1798-1814
Get PDFScholarship around Napoleonic conscription has often focused on the contest and resistance with which the state’s quest to impose compulsory service was met, and has emphasised the broad means by which conscripts sought to avoid or evade military obligations. This article will focus on outlining the experience of conscription in the Napoleonic department of Indre-et-Loire and will argue that while open evasion was a clear challenge to the authority of the state, the largest numerical challenge to filling the ranks of the army came from those who complied with conscription legislation in order to seek legal exemptions