FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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A retrospective Ulysses’ syndrome: French émigré recollections of the British host
Get PDFBetween 1789 and 1815, thousands of French counter-revolutionaries chose exile rather than abide by the new political systems brought on by the Revolution, and later by Napoléon. A large number came to the British Isles. Contemporary documents demonstrate the French exiled community cohabited peacefully alongside a rather welcoming British society. Yet, self-narratives written after the Bourbon Restoration of 1815 described a different situation, in which French and British communities often clashed over behavioural and political distinctions. These discourses appeared to have further diverged from the event as time went by. This article does not mean to assess how traumatised the French émigré populations had been when driven to exile, but how the initial trauma, i.e the forced and lengthy separation from their motherland, was modified in later narratives and scholarship first to be utilised in the creation of national memories, and later in the formation of transnational ones. Focusing on the French memorial side of this transnational phenomenon, it aims to understand the political, social, and editorial agendas driving such modifications
After the Good Life - Introduction
Get PDFWhen people refer to the good life, they usually have in mind a specific middle-class lifestyle that flourished between the 1940s and early 1970s. This lifestyle has steadily eroded since that period as the socioeconomic circumstances that sustained it disappeared; most of the welfare systems that protected the middle class have worn thin, and middle-class work has become tenuous and uncertain as a result of downsizing and permatemping. We live in a world marked, in Loïc Wacquant\u27s terms, by "Social Insecurity" (Punishing the Poor 3), a generalised sense of anxiety brought about by the acceleration of creative destruction within late capitalism. Nevertheless, the good life persists as an ideal with ambiguous effects. At times, it helps citizens challenge the neoliberal assaults on what remains of the welfare state. At other times, this ideal props up neoliberal ideology itself, keeping workers chasing after the ever-receding mirage of middle-class security
\u27To Keep Feelings in Circulation\u27: Private/Public Sexuality and Queer Ambivalence in an Age of Assimilation
Get PDFThe concept of ambivalence in U.S. queer studies has tended to be less a subject of enquiry in itself and more a component of, or catalyst for, broader arguments about how heteronormative culture shapes, restricts,and challenges queer subjectivities. In this article I explore threeforms of ambivalence in order to argue that the foregrounding of publicly ambivalent positions is essential for renegotiating what it means to be queer in an age of respectability politics and conditional mainstream acceptance.
"Jo, the outlaw with the broom": The Public and Pestiferous Role of the Vagrant in Charles Dickens\u27s Bleak House
Get PDFThis article explores Charles Dickens’s unusual characterisation of vagrant figures in his novel Bleak House. Dickens conceived of the vagrant as a public entity without any recourse to private spaces — a thesis supported here by the novel and a series of satellite texts by Dickens, Henry Mayhew and Edwin Chadwick. This conception, in turn, is both a reflection, and a perceived cause, of the vagrant’s intellectual, moral and physical degeneration. Beginning with a brief overview of vagrancy in the nineteenth century, before moving on to a discussion about Dickens’s atypical depiction of vagrant characters, this paper examines both the public presentation of vagrants and the dangers that they were perceived to pose to society at large. In doing this, this article seeks to unpick how one of the great Victorian social critics perceived the problem of nineteenth-century vagrancy and its social ramifications
Following Fashion: Sharing the Private in Public
Get PDFThis article presents an exploration of the division, or lack of division, between the private and the public in relation to online fashion personalities. In the contemporary fashion world, where technology prevails, any girl-next-door can become a recognised fashion ‘personality’, seemingly qualified to present her private thoughts to a public apparently hungry to hear them. In discussing this assumption, this article examines how conceptions of private and public fit within the realm of the fashion spectacle, with particular reference to Instagram, and how the process of fashioning a self-brand is enacted within this sharing, attention economy.
Introduction: Transnational Memory and Traumatic Histories
Get PDFMemory studies has moved from the cultural collective, rooted within the bounds of the nation state, to the transnational or transcultural, which in recent years has come to account for the circulation of “memory cultures” in an increasingly complex, globalised and violent world. In what follows, the essays in this special issue on Transnational Memory and Traumatic Histories are briefly introduced and contextualised within this transcultural framework
Diaspora, Postmemory and the Transcultural Turn in Contemporary Jewish Writing: Barbara Honigmann’s Autofictional Writings
Get PDFAccording to Marianne Hirsch, descendants of exiled Holocaust survivors unwillingly inherit their parents continued dislocation: as the homeland of their ancestors has “ceased to exist” they are destined forever to remain exiled from the “space of identity” (Family 243). The German Jewish writer Barbara Honigmann is one of those descendants of exiled Holocaust survivors even though she was born in Germany to where her parents had returned after the war. However, in contrast to Hirsch, she embraces life in diaspora and self-imposed exile as the true source for constructing a genuine identity in which she is true to her Judaism. In illuminating the discrepancy between Hirsch’s analytical reading of exilic postmemory and Barbara Honigmann’s way of creating it in literature, this article shows that different conceptualizations of diaspora give rise to different postmemorial aesthetics: whereas Hirsch’s photographic aesthetics represents the melancholic insight that a return to the place of origin is impossible, nostalgic aesthetics gives in to this very desire for a “final return” (Hall). However, both the nostalgic and the photographic aesthetics are based on a territorial understanding of home and on the idea that identity is bound to a specific space. In contrast, Honigmann’s aesthetics of postmemory, which I call transcultural, perceives diasporic identity as the result of a constant blending and mixing of cultures. Thus, identity is not connected to a distinct place, but rather to a “common genealogical origin” (Boyarin, Boyarin). However, as this origin has been forgotten, the author must laboriously reconstruct it in her autofictional writings
Proliferation, Action: Marine Plastic Pollution, Material Agency, and Affective Representation
Get PDFSeeing plastic as an actant rather than inert matter can help us better comprehend the effects of marine plastic pollution. In this essay, I read various texts that depict plastic as an actant, highlighting the ways they give narrative urgency to a crisis that we normally cannot see
Realising (re)vision, manipulating manoeuvres: editing the English Middle Ages
Get PDFThis article discusses the importance and relevance of textual editing for students and scholars of historical literatures, especially Middle English texts. By surveying the different types of editions necessary for studying Middle English literature, the author argues that in the "digital age," an understanding of The Edition is necessary, not only for the preservation of cultural texts, but also for the contribution and understanding of interpretations fundamental to literary disciplines
The Shakespeare death tercentenary celebrations in England and Scotland: How British was Shakespeare in 1916?
Get PDFThe tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death fell in 1916, during the Great War. Scholarship on the commemorations has so far focused on English attitudes to Shakespeare, with critics demonstrating how celebrants in England linked Shakespeare to notions of patriotism and national pride. This paper shows that celebrants in both Scotland and England used Shakespeare to stress the importance of British unity in wartime, and associated him with a range of concerns unrelated to national identity. It concludes with the idea that the flexibility of Shakespeare’s figure mirrors the nature of “Britishness,” making the Shakespeare of 1916 a “British icon.