FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
Not a member yet
346 research outputs found
Sort by
Reading Projects
Get PDF"By reading only six hours a day", says Marianne Dashwood, outlining her plan of future application to her sister Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, "I shall gain in the course of a twelve-month a great deal of instruction which I now feel myself to want." She adds: "Our own library is too well known to me, to be resorted to for any thing beyond mere amusement. But there are many works well worth reading at the Park; and there are others of more modern production which I know I can borrow of Colonel Brandon" (301). We know, to some extent, what was in the Dashwoods\u27 own library – volumes of Cowper, Scott and Thomson are mentioned. But what might Marianne have borrowed at Barton Park and Delaford? Which publications would Colonel Brandon have considered most appropriate for her project of self-improvement? Elinor considers Marianne\u27s plan excessive, but what would have been a more realistic amount of time for her to spend reading each day, and where might she have done it
Stealing Fire: Political Re-Appropriation of Verse Drama in Tony Harrison’s Prometheus and Liz Lochhead’s Medea
Get PDFCritical opinion of verse drama has long considered it to be an outdated and classist form. Yet in the early 21st century, certain dramatists have provided examples of how the form may be subverted not only to expose its privileged history but to provide a context for new lines of ideological enquiry. This article examines how verse drama has been re-appropriated to serve as a vehicle for socialist and feminist concerns in Liz Lochhead\u27s Medea and Tony Harrison\u27s Prometheus
Book Review: Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail
Get PDFOf interest to few beyond the fellow specialist and often uncritically aligning with harmful clichés, the new book on Europe’s refugee crisis by the radical Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek ultimately fails in its attempt to emulate the proud tradition of scholarly writing that has intervened effectively in public life
Reading Solomon J. Solomon’s Samson against the Book of Judges
Get PDFThis paper examines Solomon J. Solomon’s Samson, an interpretative artistic portrayal of the biblical Samson and Delilah narrative in Judges 16. Solomon’s painting explores themes of eroticism, power, and ‘the Other’. Solomon both embellishes and fills gaps in the biblical narrative. By doing so, he conspicuously explores themes only implicit in the Bible, thus creating content where the biblical text remains silent. Filling these narrative gaps and making the implicit explicit changes the focus of the Samson and Delilah narrative, thereby adding to the cultural memory of the biblical text and altering the way in which the biblical narrative is approached by readers
Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 268 pp. ISBN: 9781107110328, £64.99.
Get PDFPreface
Get PDFIn the preface to this special issue of FORUM on Readers and Writers, I wish to take the opportunity to think briefly about a question that preoccupies all historians of reading, to a greater or lesser extent, and that is the problem of evidence. Reading is an evanescent activity, which mostly goes unremarked, unrecorded, and very often, unnoticed. Under such circumstances, how can we retrieve its history? From Robert Darnton in 1986, outlining his ‘first steps toward a history of reading’, to those of us still working on the history of reading in 2016, we have been wrestling with precisely the same problem. As Simon Eliot put it in 1992, ‘any reading recorded in an historically recoverable way is, almost by definition, an exceptional recording of an uncharacteristic event by an untypical person’
Good versus Evil: Representations of the Monstrous in Thirteenth Century Anglo-French Apocalypse Manuscripts
Get PDFThis paper examines one of the oldest ideological conflicts of all time: that between the divine powers of good and evil in the Book of Revelation, as represented in thirteenth century Anglo-French apocalypse manuscripts. Using a theoretical framework based on medieval conceptions of the monstrous and the monstrous body, this paper will explore contrasting representations of moral ideology in three different Apocalypse manuscripts (the Trinity Apocalypse, the Douce Apocalypse, and the Getty Apocalypse), arguing that the monstrous body is employed throughout these manuscripts in order to delineate between the forces of good and evil
“Of traditional Israel and Albion”: discourses of racial purity and the Jewish body in Mina Loy’s “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose”
Get PDFThis essay explores the modernist poet Mina Loy’s work “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” (1923) within its historical and cultural context. The poem consistently challenges ideologies such as eugenics, which informed anti-Semitism and sought to strengthen notions of racial purity. Incorporating the biopolitical theory of Rosi Braidotti, this essay explores how Loy exposes the figure of the Jewish “mongrel” as a constructed figure within eugenic discourse, in turn revealing the ways in which eugenic and biopolitical ideologies work together to govern, vilify, and glorify certain lives over others
“The great night of Europe is shot through with long, sinister trains”: Transnational memory and European identity in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sepharad
Get PDFSince 1975 Spain has been engaged in the recuperation of the memory of the Francoist past. For a long time, under the headline “Spain is different”, the public debate has reflected a view of the Spanish experience as a particular event tied to the nation state. However, since the turn of the millennium such a notion is constantly being challenged by global and transnational influences that affect and reshape the local memory discourse(s). The following article aims to show how the novel Sepharad by the Spanish author Antonio Muñoz Molina could be read as a literary manifestation of a “multidirectional memory”, in which different memory scenarios in dialogue inscribe the memory of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship into a common European memory context. In this sense, the novel can be read as a paradigmatic example of a transnational memory discourse, which tries to transcend traditional Manichean divisions between “us” and ‘them”, instead focusing on the persecuted and oppressed and warning us of the presence of totalitarian and exclusionary logics in our contemporary society
Sentimentality in the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy: A Response to Berlant’s Optimism-Realism Binary
Get PDFLauren Berlant has famously problematised the sense of communal belonging wrought by sentimental humanism, yet in so doing has presumed a binary between optimism and realism, and tendered new strictures on acceptable affect. In suburban ensemble cinema we find an alternate view: sentimentality as a place of transition, and a more complex taxonomy of human relationality