In search of a Byzantine narrative canon: the Vita Basilii as an uncanonical work

Abstract

The problem of the literary genre of Vita Basilii and, by extension, of the lack of Byzantine examples of purely secular biography is one of the most well known literary controversies of Byzantine studies. With respect to this problem a revision of the usual parameters involved in the definition of literary genres will be suggested, one which will cover not only formal aspects but also contextual and functional ones. This study will propose that the features related to these parameters could be classified as more or less prototypical, thus laying the foundation for an approach to canonical narrative patterns and enabling further progress in our understanding of this unique work.     

Women,work, property and gender in early modern Europe

Natalie DAVIS & Arlette FARGE eds, A History of Women in the West, III. Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1993, ISBN 0–674–40372‐X.

Merry E. WIESNER, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, ISBN 0–521–38459–1 hardback, 0–521–38613–6 paperback.

Hilary MARLAND, ed., The Art of Midwifery. Early Modem Midwives in Europe, Routledge, London, 1993, ISBN 0–415–06425–2.

Amy Louise ERICKSON, Women and Property in Early Modem England, Routledge, London, 1993, ISBN 0–415–06267–5.     

Expanding women's rural medical work in early modern Brittany: the Daughters of the Holy Spirit

During the eighteenth century, orders of nursing sisters took on an expanded role in the rural areas of Brittany. This article explores the impact of religious change on the medical activities of these women. While limits were placed on the medical practice of unlicensed individuals, areas of new opportunity for nuns as charitable practitioners were created by devout nobles throughout the eighteenth century. These nuns provided comprehensive care for the sick poor on their patrons' estates, acting not only as nurses, but also in lieu of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries. This article argues that the medical knowledge and expertise of these sisters from the nursing orders were highly valued by the elites of early modern Brittany.     

Australindia: the geography of imperial desire

A tradition of imperial geographical fantasy fuses India and Australia. This paper discusses the strategic role these utopian proposals played in imperial erotics, in aiding the foundational ambition of empire, which is to connect. The proponents of these geographical hybrids (T.J. Maslen, W. Pickering and Thomas Livingston Mitchell) occupied very different positions in Greater Britain's colonial administration and the minority knowledges represented by their speculative overlays of India onto Australia circulated in very different cultural circles. The insider/outsider status of these ex-army, turned surveyors suggests a more complex ecology of alternative discourses circulating in the imperial imaginary: as proposals for future places, the schemes discussed in this article were fictions that aestheticized invasion, making it a metaphor for ultimate unity.     

Thai migrants in Singapore: state,intimacy and desire

In this article, I analyse Thai migration to Singapore, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2004–06) to discuss the experiences of male construction workers and female sex workers in negotiating heterosexuality during their temporary residence. I argue that these Thai migrants engage in transient heterosexual encounters as one of many calculated, strategic ways of negotiating their intimate identity and subjectivity in the survival circuits of this global city. Their transient sexual acts are intimate products of negotiated moves, which form a major part of their semi-anonymous, temporary life in a foreign land. The sexual practices of Thai migrant workers in Singapore, I argue, are best understood by taking the following factors into account: the host government's regulation and control of its migrant population; the foreign workers' economic and social situations of mobility as inscribed in their highly dynamic traveling biographies; and their rationalized willingness and desire to embrace transient sexual intimacies as part of their employment and/or struggling lives in the global city's survival circuits.     

'A Choice of Nightmares': Narration and desire in Heart of Darkness

This paper considers the gendered organisation of narration in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is argued that the text fictionalises its audience as an exclusively masculine community of readers, bounded together by shared interests and commitments. The discursive construction of preferred reading positions is critically examined with reference to the mobilisation of discourses of cannibalism and representations of femininity in the text. It is argued that positive evaluations of the text, as a critique of imperialism or a commentary on the human condition, are problematised by consideration of the gender values inscribed in the texture of the narrative.     

Memory in warfare: history as a destituent narrative

Abstract

To what extent may we consider historical writing a field of political tension? Could we make a plausible conceptual distinction between a constituent and a destituent narrative? According to Carlo Ginzburg – one of the proponents of ‘microhistory’ – historical sources are ‘distorting mirrors’, which let the truth shine through in an indirect way. Consequently, the good historian is the one who manages to grasp the ‘Freudian slips’ of history and fixes them in a coherent framework. Michel Foucault’s ‘political historicism’ seems to adopt the same historiographical approach: the most reliable witnesses of the past are the victims of the dominant power and the forgotten subjects of the constituent historical narrative. It seems to the author that Walter Benjamin and Simone Weil’s warfare writings share this destituent attitude towards historical representations. As far as Benjamin is concerned, the author’s hypothesis is that between the two world wars he radically redefines his notion of memory. With the apotheosis of the Nazi regime, he starts to conceive memory of the catastrophic past as the only possible input of an authentic revolutionary action. With a similar attention to collective memory, Weil goes through European history in order to deconstruct its principal political mythologies, from Rome to the Third Reich. Her purpose is to let the stories of the defeated re-emerge in order to show the history of violence that lies beyond the official representation of the past. In both cases, the main political aim is eventually to produce a destituent narrative of Europe that could serve as a guideline in the post-war period.     

Reconciliation and research in Afghanistan: an analytical narrative

This article examines the evolution of western policy towards the idea of pursuing negotiations with the Taliban, or ‘reconciliation’, in Afghanistan and the role that research and expert opinion played in that process. The official western position has evolved iteratively from initial rejection to near complete embrace of exploring the potential for talks. It is widely assumed that the deteriorating security situation was the sole determinant of this major policy reversal, persuading decision‐makers to rethink what had once been deemed unthinkable. Moreover, given the politicized and sensitive nature of the subject, we might expect the potential for outside opinion to influence decision‐makers to be low. Nevertheless, this article demonstrates that it would be a mistake to underestimate the role that research and expert knowledge played—the story is more nuanced and complex. Research coalesced, sometimes prominently, with other key drivers to spur and shape policy change. Importantly, it often took experts to make sense of events on the ground, especially where the failure of the military approach was not recognized, understood or palatable to those in official circles. Research interacted with changing events, policy windows, the emergence of new personalities and the actions of various intermediaries to shape emerging positions. More broadly, the case of reconciliation in Afghanistan reveals the difficulties and challenges, but also the variety of opportunities and techniques, for achieving research influence in conflict‐affected environments.     

Gender in Post-Doi Moi Vietnam: Women,desire, and change

On the eve of doi moi's twentieth anniversary, this group of papers examines the impact of ‘economic renovation’ on the lives of Vietnam's women. Economically, the transformation is unarguable. Socially, the impacts have been as deep, but more uneven and possibly less predictable. These four papers examine different aspects of contemporary Vietnamese women's experience through the lens of desire: mothers confronting the age-old desire for sons under the government's small-family policy, young women's desire to explore sexuality in the strict moral environment of the countryside, piece-workers' desire for better conditions and better lives but unable to mobilize their proletarian class position in a socialist regime, and the desire of authors to evoke women's war-time roles to create a shared national remembrance of suffering, sacrifice, and loss. In their diverse ways, these papers offer unusual insights and rare glimpses into the lives of women in post-doi moi Vietnam.

El Género en Vietnam Post-‘Doi Moi’: Mujeres, deseo y cambio

La víspera de que cumple veinte años el doi moi, esta antología de papeles examina el impacto de ‘la reforma económica’ en las vidas de mujeres vietnamitas. Económicamente, no se puede discutir la transformación. Socialmente, los impactos han sido no solo profundo sino más desigual y posiblemente menos previsible. Los cuatro papeles examinan unos aspectos distintas de las experiencias contemporánea de mujeres vietnamitas a través de las lentes de deseo: madres se enfrentan al deseo antiguo de tener hijos bajo la política estatal de pequeña-familia; las mujeres jóvenes que desean a explorar su sexualidad dentro de un ambiente de morales estricto en el campo; el deseo de destajistas de tener mejores condiciones y vidas mejores pero incapaz de movilizar a sus posiciones de la clase proletaria bajo un régimen socialista; y el deseo de autores de suscitar los papeles de guerra que tenían mujeres para crear una conmemoración nacional compartida de sufrimiento, sacrificio, y pérdida. De sus modos diversos, estos papeles ofrecen perspicacias originales y raras vislumbres de las vidas de mujeres en post-doi moi Vietnam.     

Placing Managua: a landscape narrative in post-earthquake Nicaragua

On 23 December 1972, a major earthquake occurred near Managua, Nicaragua. Followed by two strong aftershocks, the earthquake had devastating consequences for the people of Nicaragua's capital, and corruption and mismanagement during the relief efforts gave impetus to what would become the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979. The earthquake also dramatically altered the landscape of the capital, destroying most of the city's historic center. Abandoned after the earthquake, the area nevertheless maintains a prominent symbolic role in Nicaragua, and in many ways remains the heart of a vastly changed modern city. The revolution was celebrated in the historic core, and memorials, government buildings, and ongoing revitalization efforts have all shaped it in the nearly four decades since its devastation. Though initially abandoned, it remains a powerful and dynamic place. This article investigates landscape transitions in the historic heart of Managua since the tumultuous events of the 1970s, with particular emphasis on the ways in which visions of Nicaragua's past, present, and future are reflected in the competing currents of the built landscape.     

Literary geography: setting and narrative space

This paper explores some of the ways in which analytical strategies developed within narrative theory might be combined with recent developments in literary geography in the study of setting and narrative space. It suggests that despite narrative theory's urge toward categorization and its associated tendency to conceive of space as relatively stable and fixed, the technical vocabulary developed within the discipline has much to offer the literary geographer. The first section of the paper reviews some of the areas of potential collaboration in this cross-disciplinary overlap, while the second section offers three brief case study readings designed to suggest the potential of a combination of the analytical specificity of narrative studies with the imaginative stretch of spatial theory. The case studies look at setting and narrative space as they emerge in relation to narrative voices and multiple audiences in three case study texts: P.K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), J.A. Mitchell's The Last American (1889), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925).     

Whitewashed empire: Historical narrative and place marketing in Vienna

ABSTRACT

The historical narrative of Habsburg grandeur has played a decisive role in branding the Austrian capital of Vienna. While scholars have situated place-marketing strategies within de-historicized frameworks of the neoliberal city, the nostalgic framing of imperial spatial assemblages should be critically interpreted from a historical vantage point. In tourist spaces such as the Kaiserforum, urbanists, museum curators, right-wing groups, and real-estate investors employ the discourse of Habsburg patrimony to leverage past spatial inequalities for contemporary purposes. Such nostalgic narratives obfuscate the historical material conditions of their making. I argue that this very obfuscation constitutes a continuing legacy of empire. I call this process ‘whitewashed empire,’ the redeployment of imperial structures through the preservation, renovation and assemblage of material heritage. As a memorial assemblage of narrative selection and a political economic relation of exploitation, imperial nostalgia extends the work of Habsburg spatial production into the present.     

Personal lives: narrative accounts of Irish women in the diaspora

The burst of writing about Irish women in the diaspora after the 1980s, led by Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam and Joanne O'Brien's Across the Water: Irish Women's Lives in Britain, coincided with the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences and literary representation. This paper uses Carol Smart's concepts of Personal Life (2007) – memory, biography, embeddedness, relationality and the imaginary – to examine a range of ways in which personal narratives have become central to our understandings of Irish women and their descendants in both written and visual representations. It interweaves disciplines, bringing together a wide range of sources including academic and public accounts in which Irish women appear both as main characters and in walk-on parts. It explores constructions of these ‘fictions’ and their connections with the biographies of authors.