FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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I am a Cliché
Get PDFI am a writer. Being comfortable saying this is taking me a long time. While I wait for that day to arrive I revisit some of my old work. I find it full of clichés and feel embarrassed by its naivety and simplicity. This is the story of my development as a writer. This is the story of my increasing ambivalence towards academic writing
The Material Poetics of Fabien Bürgy: Reflections on Spikes
Get PDFFabien Bürgy’s work creates interstitions in which the virtual becomes indistinguishable from the real, and the real becomes impregnated with the virtual. Spikes is a sculpture-installation that exists in a threshold in which matter becomes digital and the digital becomes matter. This review addresses the many conceptual layers particular to this artwork, and wishes to preserve the aura of inscrutability that belongs to its poetics
Molecularising Nature: How Scandinavian Wolves Became Natural
Get PDFThis paper examines the construction and stabilisation of Scandinavian wolves as natural and worthy of protection. I argue that molecular biology was crucial to this process, and that the most significant work of the molecular biologists was to construct boundaries between pairs of categories, such as natural and unnatural
We Have Built You: On the Nature of Artificial Intelligence in Blade Runner and Babylon Babies.
Get PDFWhile “Artificial Intelligence” describes cognition occurring on the part of machines, over the last several decades representations in television, film, and literature complicate what might comprise “the natural” relative to intelligence. This article explores what is at stake, besides masterful control, in narratives of intelligence as mediated and technical
Creative Ecologies: Derek Walcott’s Postcolonial Ecopoetics
Get PDFThis essay explores the centrality of Derek Walcott’s poetics of nature to his creative imagination. Forensic attention to language illustrates how connections between the mind and its environments engage critical work at the intersection of ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Poetry’s contribution to a resolution of these discourses’ conflicting concerns is revealed, in a fresh analysis of Walcott’s poetic ecology
Half Fish, Half Monster: Shakespeare’s Caliban and the Performance of Natural History
Get PDFStarting around the time of Shakespeare’s birth, a group of naturalists engaged in a collective enterprise to enumerate and distinguish strange varieties in the new world, including what were thought to be monsters and supernatural beings. Although this controversy would lead to the idea that human races were distinct species in the nineteenth century, considering The Tempest in the context of natural history demonstrates that the development of scientific racism was far from inevitable
Tales of Torment: Death, Nature, and Genre in Keri Hulme’s Short Story Collection Te Kaihau/The Windeater
Get PDFThis article engages in close reading of New Zealand Maori writer Keri Hulme\u27s 1986 short fiction collection. It explores how she borrows from Western literary genres to create a syncretic literature of unease and build a universe where death and destruction are linked to an imbalance in the natural world
The Sacred Oath of a Secret Ritual: Performing Authority and Submission in the Mafia Initiation Ceremony
Get PDFThis paper draws on socio-anthropological theories of ritual and performance to analyse the initiation ceremony of the Sicilian mafia in relation to questions of power, authority and submission. In particular, it looks at the oath of loyalty sworn during the ceremony as a highly symbolic ritual practice which contributes to maintaining and strengthening the social structure of the group and itscollective identity
Spatialising Ritual: Acts of Remembrance in Contemporary Memorial Design
Get PDFThis paper examines the processes of ritual performance and ritualisation in contemporary memorial design, and argues that through their design, creation, and use, memorials have the capacity to invoke ritual action that is akin to those associated with sacred space. Spatialising ritual is thereby achieved by consciously allowing for the possibility of ritual action, where memory, rather than an end product, is reframed as remembrance, a process
Transformative Impetus: A Look at Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.
Get PDFVirginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) works against the grain of understanding human subjectivity and its relationship with environment as mechanistic, primarily anthropocentric or teleological. It puts forth worlds that crisscross boundaries between nature and culture, the human and the animal. This essay explores the ways in which Woolf’s portrayal of a decentralized, temporal relativity finds voice through principles of co-evolution and complexity theory, highlighting the co-dependency operating within evolutionary development as a transformative impetus