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The fatality of scientific monomania: a study of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige
Full text linkIn this essay I will investigate the various links between scientific development, death, and monomania in an interdisciplinary analysis of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film The Prestige. This essay consists of three parts, focusing on the inventor, the invention, and the relationship between science and the arts. The first part of this essay discusses the inventor. It will compare the characters of Victor Frankenstein and Rupert Angier, contrasting and relating their motivations and behaviours in using scientific means to further their careers and reach their objectives. The second component of this essay pertains to the invention itself, primarily by contrasting the characters of Frankenstein’s monster and Rupert Angier’s Prestiges. This section will also discuss how the narrative structures of the film and novel subdue these voices within their respective texts while provoking the reader to formulate their own critical interpretation of the invention’s existence. The third and concluding section of this essay hopes to create further discourse between the scientific discipline and the arts. It evaluates the relationship these artistic texts share with the science which inspires them and argues that they react to the public interest and fears surrounding science rather than aiming to provide an accurate presentation of the scientific subject
Defiance through rediscovery: the “Burmese english” memoir, imperial “borders”, and nation-building
Full text linkThis article seeks to explore the complicated role that the memoir form of Thant Myint-U’s text, The River of Lost Footsteps, plays in the development of a combined national identity and literature in the context of Burma. The River of Lost Footsteps is read as a literary foray into Burmese sociopolitical history that is focalised through Thant Myint-U’s necessarily personalised lens. Through an exploration of “Burmese english” as a radical linguistic act of reclamation and rediscovery, this polemic comes to the conclusion that an understanding of language as a material pursuit is essential to the process of achieving the self-direction of formerly colonised nations and nation-states. I reach this conclusion by developing an argument that deploys the scope of a distinctively racialised authorial perspective. In doing so, post-colonialism can be construed as a twofold operation; to be postcolonial is to be theorised as such, but it also enacts post-colonialism through language use as a means of resistance against the naturalised imperial project of both past and present
The withdrawal from Empire: Post-war immigration’s influence upon English society going into the 1970s
Full text linkEnglish post-war immigration has a turbulent history. Surprisingly, directly after the war, immigrants were mostly welcomed into English society with Polish, Irish, and Italian communities forming across the country. This began to change by the 1950s after the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush into Tilbury docks saw the first immigrants from outside Europe taking up their rights as a British Citizens to emigrate to the centre of the Commonwealth. “White Riots” broke out across the country in the latter half of the 1950s as traditionally white English communities began to fear what they saw as a “disrupting coloured invasion of their identity”. This caused a political backlash and saw the pushing through of the Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968, and 1976 through parliament which outlawed various racial prejudices and discrimination on grounds of colour, race, ethnicity or national origins. Ultimately, the friction caused by increased immigration reached a crashing crescendo in 1968 with Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech which was met with vocal support up and down the country. Today, immigration, and the political and social connotations that come with it, are an accepted part of societal life. This article aims to show how and why this came about and the disruption this caused for English society; tracing the timeline of immigration from directly after the Second World War to the early 1970s
Suicide, Grief, and Authenticity
Full text linkThere are no codes or customs that reciprocate the grief we suffer when somebody we know or love has committed suicide, and neither are such dictates possible. As such, it remains only for us to find our way in coping with our grief in the moments that we live through it. The grief itself can never be eliminated and so we can only choose how we shall confront our situation. The aim of our discussion here is to reveal various attitudes that can be taken in response to the various aspects of the change in our world heralded by somebody’s suicide. Understanding what it is to co-exist with the Other who has died allows us to show what it is to now exist with their absence. The disruption that follows is always open to our choosing whether to act in acceptance or refusal of the complications of the situation, to act either authentically or inauthentically. In our discussion, we shall see that by taking an inauthentic attitude we can overcomplicate our suffering by acting in ways that seem to simplify our grief. Considerations of these attempts to simplify will reveal that in taking an authentic attitude we avoid overcomplicating our grief and spare ourselves much unnecessary suffering. At the heart of everything said will be the freedom to choose our actions and beliefs
“Bigly” Interpellations: Trump and the Crisis of American Ideology
Full text linkThe election of Donald Trump to the presidency sent shockwaves throughout the political sphere both domestically and internationally. The intrusion of such a volatile and abnormal political figure led to lacklustre analyses of the populism that buoyed his rise. This article will show how American populism is both a direct reaction to and an outcome of a dominant ideology upheld by the institutionalised American political class. After first outlining what type of ideological framework will be utilised, this article will then show how Trump is a symbolic representation of the crisis that American ruling ideology is undergoing
Post-War Poetry: The Impact of the First World War in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Hope Mirrlees’s Paris
No full textThe modernist poems “The Waste Land” (1922) and Paris (1919) both respond in oblique ways to the aftermath of the First World War, featuring prominent images of both death and societal decline as well as new growth and restoration. Through close readings which place these two texts within the post-war context and the poetic and literary responses of this period, I examine the ways in which T. S. Eliot and Hope Mirrlees combine emotional and societal responses to the First World War with wider conceptions of civilisation, myth, folklore and cultural history
Has a lack of historical scholarship suppressed Italy’s role in the Holocaust and therefore affected how it is remembered?
Full text linkThis essay seeks to examine the effects of the Holocaust on Italian national identity, and how it has been influenced by revisionist interpretations of the period. It is focused heavily on Italy, but also acknowledges the transnational nature of the Holocaust and its widespread devastation. There was a lack of early historiography on the topic owing to the focus on Germany’s substantially larger role in the atrocity, which meant that Italy was widely viewed as an innocent bystander, rather than as a perpetrator. However, recent historiography has revealed that Italy’s role is much more complex than popular memory indicates, which has had an impact on how it is commemorated. Hence, this paper explores how these commemorations have developed, including the begrudged taking of responsibility for anti-Semitic actions that occurred on Italian soil
A rosebush behind the hedge: Josef Hoffmann’s Villa Henneberg as a total work of art
Full text linkThe domestic interior provided an important ground for the emerging modernist aesthetics of fin-de-siècle Vienna. This article attempts to broaden the discourse on the nature of the interior as a total work of art by analysing the interplay of elements such as exterior spaces, gardens, and cultural revival of the Biedermeier, in relation to Josef Hoffmann’s commission of the Villa Henneberg (1900–1901). This architectural project puts forward a unique visualisation of modernist thought where the Gesamtkunstwerk is embodied on multiple levels, and in which boundaries between exterior and interior become blurred. The villa thus comes to represent not only a synthesis of varied art forms but also a space in which its inhabitants subject themselves to becoming a part of the total work of art
A critical assessment of the evidence for selective female infanticide as a cause of the Viking Age
No full textThere currently exists in the study of Viking archaeology a strong support for the theory, popularised by Barrett (2015), that selective female infanticide in the Late Scandinavian Iron Age to Early Viking Age resulted in the sudden expansion of Scandinavian influence, through raiding, invading, and trading, across Europe that categorises the Viking age. This paper aims to critique the evidence for selective female infanticide as a cause of the Viking age and suggests that it may have been only a partial factor in causing the Viking Age. This paper will review the current literature on the subject and consider the evidence currently available, Archaeological and literary, in order to critique this currently dominant theory
“At its best […] Imagist poetry is about […] the porous threshold between inner and outer, abstract and concrete, the intimate and the glitteringly impersonal” (McGuiness): How does the liminal operate in H.D.’s “Garden” and “Eurydice”, and to what effect?
Full text linkThis essay proposes that the way H.D.’s poetry negotiates gender is possible by means of her liminal poetics. After discussing Turner’s concept of liminality and its pertinence to H.D., it will look at how her poetics can be considered liminal; simultaneous to evolving an understanding of what a liminal poetics might be. It will use Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text to argue that in “Garden” and “Eurydice”, H.D. disrupts the reader’s expectations of poetry—and thus attempts to disrupt their relations with the world