FROM CATASTROPHE TO HOPE

In his recent book, Amir Eshel focuses on over thirty recent German‐, Hebrew‐, and English‐language novels to develop a reading method—the “hermeneutics of futurity”—that would replace moralizing approaches to past traumas, including German guilt over the Holocaust and Israeli denial of Palestinian suffering. Futurity demonstrates how various narratives imagine a future liberated from denial, guilt, and thus traumatic repetition. In so doing Eshel emphasizes human agency to counter the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that has long dominated a great deal of literary theory, and focuses on how novelists construct human choices and their consequences. He covers two generations of German‐language novels spanning the Adenauer era to the present, and two generations of Israeli writers reflecting on 1948 and later, 1967. In order to develop fully the concept of futurity he also writes on recent American and English novels, often with implicitly political themes. The book succeeds in demonstrating the value of how various novelists read the past otherwise in order to reconstruct the present and future. At the same time, Eshel conceives human agency and “choice” so capaciously that the book often neglects the institutional constraints on agency that afflict victims of traumas in particular. His treatment of Martin Walser's controversial fictionalized memoir is exemplary of this problem in an otherwise stimulating work.     

Experimental and Conceptual Innovators in the Sciences: The Cases of Darwin and Einstein

Abstract

During the past decade, analyses of artistic creativity have demonstrated the contrast in creative life cycles between experimental old masters and conceptual young geniuses. This article extends the analysis to scientists. Charles Darwin was a great experimental innovator, who spent decades accumulating evidence on evolution and its mechanisms, and made his greatest contributions late in his career. In contrast, Albert Einstein was a great conceptual innovator, who made discoveries through highly abstract reasoning, and made his greatest contributions early in his career. The careers of these two great scientists are thus consistent with the thesis that, as in the arts, conceptual creativity is associated with youth, but experimental creativity increases with age.     

Towards The “New Rural History”: A Review Essay

The true subject of art history is the succession of innovations that have changed the practices of artists over time. This article uses a survey of illustrations in textbooks to consider not only when in their careers the greatest artists of the twentieth century made their greatest discoveries but also how quickly they made them. The results underscore the dominant position of Pablo Picasso and Cubism in twentieth-century art: Picasso alone accounts for the two best three-year periods produced by any artist, and he and Georges Braque account for three of the best five-year periods, all for the work the two young artists did in creating Cubism. Andy Warhol's innovations in pop art and Henri Matisse's development of Fauvism also rank among the century's most important breakthroughs. In general, identifying the most important short periods of artistic creativity highlights the differing methods of conceptual and experimental artists: great conceptual innovators (e.g., Picasso, Matisse, and Warhol) made their greatest discoveries abruptly, whereas great experimental innovators (e.g., Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock) made their discoveries more gradually. The finding that artists who innovate early in their lives do so suddenly, whereas those who innovate late do so more gradually, adds an important dimension to our understanding of human creativity.     

Toward Abstraction Ranking European Painters of the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract. Paris was the unrivaled capital of modern art in the nineteenth century, but during the early twentieth century major innovations began to be made elsewhere in Europe. The author examined the careers of the artists who led such movements as Italian Futurism, German Expressionism, Holland's De Stijl, and Russia's Suprematism. Quantitative analysis revealed the implications of the conceptual basis of the art of Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio de Chirico, Kazimir Malevich, and Edvard Munch, and of the experimental origin of the innovations of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian. The finding that the invention of abstract art was made nearly simultaneously by the conceptual Malevich and the experimental Kandinsky and Mondrian particularly indicates the importance of both deductive and inductive approaches in the history of modern art.     

The Reappearing Masterpiece: Ranking American Artists and Art Works of the Late Twentieth Century

A survey of the illustrations in textbooks of modern art produces the startling finding that art scholars consider Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty to be the most important individual work made by an American artist during the past 150 years. More generally, quantifying the evidence of the textbooks reveals the source of the pluralism, or stylistic incoherence, of American art since the late 1960s. A persistently high demand for artistic innovation has produced a regime in which conceptual approaches have predominated. The art world has consequently been flooded by a series of new ideas, often embodied in individual works, usually made by young artists who have failed to make more than one significant contribution in their careers. The monumental Spiral Jetty, made in 1970 by a young artist who was killed soon thereafter while in the process of making his art, brought together a remarkable number of the central themes of the advanced art of the time and has become a symbol for that art.     

A Workshop on European Peasants

Art critics and scholars have puzzled over the behavior of Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, and Sigmar Polke, three important modern painters who have made frequent and abrupt changes of style. In each case, assuming this behavior to be idiosyncratic, the experts consequently failed to recognize its common basis. But stylistic versatility is in fact often a characteristic of conceptual innovators whose ability to solve specific problems can free them to pursue new goals. This contrasts sharply with the practice of experimental artists, whose inability to achieve their goals often ties them to a single style for an entire career. The phenomenon of the conceptual innovator who produces diverse innovations is an important and new feature of twentieth-century art; Picasso was the prototype, and he has been followed by a series of others, from Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia to Bruce Nauman and Damien Hirst. Versatility has furthermore been a characteristic not only of modern painters but also of conceptual innovators in other arts, and of conceptual scholars. Recognizing the common basis of this behavior deepens our understanding not only of twentieth-century art but also of human creativity more generally, for it adds a dimension to the contrast between conceptual and experimental innovators.     

Neurognostics Answer

Although many individuals contributed to the development of the science of cerebral localization, its conceptual framework is the work of a single man—John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911), a Victorian physician practicing in London. Hughlings Jackson's formulation of a neurological science consisted of an axiomatic basis, an experimental methodology, and a clinical neurophysiology. His axiom—that the brain is an exclusively sensorimotor machine—separated neurology from psychiatry and established a rigorous and sophisticated structure for the brain and mind. Hughlings Jackson's experimental method utilized the focal lesion as a probe of brain function and created an evolutionary structure of somatotopic representation to explain clinical neurophysiology. His scientific theory of cerebral localization can be described as a weighted ordinal representation. Hughlings Jackson's theory of weighted ordinal representation forms the scientific basis for modern neurology. Though this science is utilized daily by every neurologist and forms the basis of neuroscience, the consequences of Hughlings Jackson's ideas are still not generally appreciated. For example, they imply the intrinsic inconsistency of some modern fields of neuroscience and neurology. Thus, “cognitive imaging” and the “neurology of art”—two topics of modern interest—are fundamentally oxymoronic according to the science of cerebral localization. Neuroscientists, therefore, still have much to learn from John Hughlings Jackson.     

11 September 2001: the Italian writers’ response

One month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the Corriere della Sera published an article on the possible future consequences for literature of this horrific event. Some novelists boldly declared their work would not be affected at all, while others observed that their literary visions and perspectives were already responses to life's tragic aspects. Several writers confessed to wondering, at least initially, whether literature henceforth could continue to have any real sense. A decade later, this essay examines the nature of the Italian response. It looks first at the views of those writers who expressed opinions directly to the press or in essay form, and then at a small number of novels (by Tullio Avoledo, Marisa Bulgheroni and Tiziana Rinaldi Castro) and short stories (by Andrea Piva, Andrej Longo and Andrea Canobbio) which have embraced the theme, and which have done so in ways that reinforce the sense of an underlying political and/or cultural aesthetic. Connections between twenty-first-century reactions to 9/11 and the Italian experience or memory of political terrorism and war will be explored, as well as the question of inspiration for novelists, in the particular context of catastrophe or trauma.     

An Anatomy of the London Agent

This article considers the London agent through the careers of Gilbert Mabbott and, to a lesser extent, William Raylton. The London agent was a commonplace in early modern political culture, but the phenomenon is rarely addressed in the historiography. I argue for the importance of the agent to early modern English history in general, but I also consider Mabbott's situation in particular. Because of the civil wars, Mabbott was able to rise beyond his social station as a scrivener and freed himself from the bonds of the patron‐client relationship. This article seeks to define some of the roles played by agents in the early modern period by looking at Mabbott's and Raylton's work for their major employers: Thomas Wentworth, Hull, royalist delinquents and their children, various parliamentary armies, and Oliver Cromwell. It ends by looking at the wealth that Mabbott acquired through his work, both before and after the Restoration, as demonstrative of how an agent's power could yield impressive rewards when freed of social constraints.     

The Changing Brazilian Language

This article analyzes two female Bildungsromane published by nineteenth-century authors, Las dos Gracias by Fernán Caballero (1867) and La vida íntima by Pilar Sinués (1876). The female Bildungsroman in Spain explores different educational and developmental opportunities open to women since the middle of the nineteenth century. Fernán Caballero and Pilar Sinués, who have been—and still often are—dismissed as anti-feminist and conservative, created a very nuanced vision of female Bildung in their novels. Far from being mere propaganda pieces aimed at keeping women in subjection, these novels discuss the obstacles that society places in the way to female development and offer ways of overcoming these obstacles.     

Conceptions of Reinhart Koselleck's Theory of Historical Time in the Thinking of Michael Oakeshott

In recent years students of politics have begun to recognise Reinhart Koselleck's practice of Begriffsgeschichte, the study of conceptual history, as a useful approach for investigating key concepts in political ideologies and the history of ideas. But his theory of historical time—the temporal dimension to his semantic project and his broader theorising of the historical discipline—is often overlooked and underused as a heuristic device. By placing the thinking of Michael Oakeshott alongside Koselleck's theory of historical time, this article brings his thinking on temporality to the forefront, fashioning a conversation between the two thinkers about the place for history and the formal criteria necessary for ordering the past properly. In doing so, it juxtaposes Koselleck's reflections on historicity and his theory of historical time with Oakeshott's philosophical enquiry on the historical mode of understanding. It identifies important convergences and divergences between the two thinkers' theories, focusing in particular on questions regarding the potential for representing the past as multilayered and plural historical times. The article then suggests that their respective thoughts on the theory of history are in part a reaction to the modern politicisation of historical time and comprise a shared critique of radical political change.     

Hobbes's Contribution to International Thought,and the Contribution of International Thought to Hobbes

Summary

The aim of this article is to explore in what respects Thomas Hobbes may be regarded as foundational in international thought. It is evident that in contemporary international relations theory he has become emblematic of a realist tradition, but as David Armitage suggests this was not always the case. I want to suggest that it is only in a very limited sense that he may be regarded as a foundational thinker in international relations, and for reasons very different from those for which he has become infamous. In the early histories of international thought Hobbes is a cameo figure completely eclipsed by Grotius. In early histories of political literature, the classic jurists were often acknowledged for their remarkable contributions to international relations, but Hobbes is referred to exclusively as a philosopher of a positvist ethics and absolute sovereignty. It is among the jurists themselves that Hobbes is believed to have made important conceptual moves which set the problems for international thought for the next three centuries. He conflates natural law and the law of nations, arguing that they differ only in their subjects—the former individuals, the latter nations or states. This entailed transforming the sovereign into an artificial man, not in the Roman Law sense of an entity capable of suing and being sued; rather, as a subject not party to a contract, but created by a contract among individuals who confer upon it authority. This subject is not constrained by the contractors, but is, as individuals were in the state of nature, constrained by the equivalent of natural law, the law of nations in the international context. Throughout, the methodological implications are drawn for modern historians of political thought and political philosophers who venture to theorise about international relations.     

The World of Kurdish Women's Novels

The Kurdish novel emerged in 1935 and, towards the end of the twentieth century, established itself as a literary genre with a significant quantity and quality. However, until the last decade of the previous century the Kurdish novel was entirely dominated by Kurdish men and there is no single novel written by a Kurdish woman. During recent years, however, Kurdish women novelists have contributed to the development of this genre. This article aims to assess Kurdish women's novel-writing and, through analyzing and discussing their style and themes, tries to find out their main characteristic generic features. An attempt is made to see if there are thematic and stylistic differences between Kurdish novels written by the women and their male counterparts.     

France,Patrie, Nation: figures de lutte et discours national (XVIème–XIXème siècles)

This article explores the conceptual changes and semantic shifts of ‘patrie’ and of nation from the Renaissance up to the French Revolution and the First Empire. It emphasises the causes and consequences of both concepts' occurrence and tries to discover their fundamental differences synchronically and diachronically. A brief comparison with other European countries allows us to understand that both concepts are not typically French and highlights the very fact that they are interactive, discontinuous, and at the same time evolutionary, since they are successively inserted in a specific historical context. Above all, ‘patrie’ and nation turn out to be used more often during national and international political conflicts, even though they did not have the same connotation and register. It is therefore interesting to consider precisely what characterises both concepts, and to reflect upon the origins of the modern meaning of nation.     

Sociology,Religion, and Historians Revisited: Towards an Historical Sociology of Religion

Abstract

Two great movie directors were both born in 1930. One of them, Jean-Luc Godard, revolutionized filmmaking during his 30s and declined in creativity thereafter. In contrast, Clint Eastwood did not direct his first movie until he had passed the age of 40 and did not emerge as an important director until after he was 60. This dramatic difference in life cycles was not accidental, but was a characteristic example of a pattern that has been identified across the arts: Godard was a conceptual innovator who peaked early, whereas Eastwood was an experimental innovator who improved with experience. This article examines the goals, methods, and creative life cycles of Godard, Eastwood, and eight other directors who were the most important filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century. Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Spielberg, and François Truffaut join Godard in the category of conceptual young geniuses, while Woody Allen, Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, and Martin Scorsese are classed with Eastwood as experimental old masters. In an era in which conceptual innovators have dominated a number of artistic activities, the strong representation of experimental innovators among the greatest film directors is an interesting phenomenon.     

1. PRETEXTURES OF TIME

Textures of Time is a rich and challenging book that raises a host of important and hard questions about historical narrative, form, and style; the sociology of texts; and the core problem of ascertaining historical truth. Two that pertain to the book's main claims are of special interest to nonspecialist readers: Is register or style—“texture”—necessarily and everywhere diagnostic of “history”? Does a new kind of “historical consciousness” emerge in south India beginning in the sixteenth century, indeed as a sign of an Indian early modernity?Textures is not the first book to argue that historical discourse is constitutively marked by a peculiar style, but the claim is beset by difficulties that scholars since Barthes have detailed. Rather than textures of time—accounts of what really happened in history—what these works offer us may be only pretextures of time, textualized forms of a human experience that make claims about its degrees and types of truth through representations of various states of temporality. Instead of assessing, then, whether these works are history or something else like “myth,” we might ask whether they invite us to transcend this very dichotomy, to try, that is, to make sense of historical forms of consciousness rather than to identify forms of historical consciousness. As for modernity, nothing in south Indian historiography from 1500–1800 remotely compares to the conceptual revolution of Europe. But why should we expect the newness of the early modern world to have been experienced the same way everywhere? Modernity across Asia may have shown simultaneity without symmetry. Should this asymmetry turn out to reveal continuity and not rupture, however, no need to lament the fact. There is no shame in premodernity.     

A Voice in the Nation: Women Journalists in the Early Nineteenth‐Century South

Recent work on southern women and intellectual life in the nineteenth‐century South has focused on women novelists. Relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to literary periodicals as important vehicles through which women earned financial reward and often regional or national reputations as authors and editors. Perhaps most significantly, southern women viewed periodicals as opportunities to speak out boldly on politics and current events, much more so than in the novel. The wide availability after 1820 of magazines and newspapers, made possible by their low cost and portability, provided the perfect forum for women who wished to push against traditional gender boundaries. In examining southern women’s contributions to early nineteenth‐century periodical culture, one sees a vital part of the foundation being laid for later movements for women’s suffrage.     

Self-Ownership and Moral Relations to Self in Early Modern Britain

Summary

This paper scrutinises early modern thinking about our moral relations to ourselves. It begins by reiterating the too-often-ignored point that full self-ownership was not a position defended in Britain—by Locke or anyone else. In fact, the actual early modern positions about the moral relations we have to ourselves have been obscured by our present-day interest in self-ownership. The paper goes on to organise the moral history of the self by examining the reasons available for prohibiting self-harm. Those reasons typically had their source in God, self, and others. Major divisions in the period arose over which kinds of reasons could be invoked and why. The defining feature of this intellectual landscape was the debate between ‘other-regarding’ and ‘dignity’ theorists, who differed over the moral status of the self and over its importance as a source of moral reasons. More dramatically and controversially, various freethinkers and sceptics questioned the importance of God as a source of prohibitions for self-harm. After offering an interpretation of this history, the paper concludes by noting some connections and contrasts between early modern and present-day moral and political philosophy on the moral status of the self.     

CHRONOCENOSIS: HOW TO IMAGINE THE MULTIPLICITY OF TEMPORALITIES WITHOUT LOSING THE EMPHASIS ON POWER AND CONFLICTS

The twentieth century witnessed the historicization of the categories of time and space. Instead of functioning as a universal category, moving from the past to the present and from the present to the future, time has multiplied into temporalities, and historians have looked for adequate metaphors to describe this multiplicity, its many ways of moving forward and backward, its acceleration and decelerations, its entanglements, and its conflicts and struggles for hegemony. The editors of Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History offer a thought-provoking concept by translating biocenosis, the coexistence of different species in the same environment, to time studies and thus using the term “chronocenosis” to refer to different temporalities sharing the same embattled space. The volume covers a large variety of case studies—ranging from early modern Chinese historical novels to attempts to bring together social and biological time in the discussion of the Anthropocene—and draws together disciplines that are not usually discussed in studies of temporalities, disciplines ranging from law to the history of science.