Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting,St. Alban’s, 1869

A round-headed window in the cathedral close at Winchester, drawn by John Aubrey on or before March 1669 for his Chronologia architectonica, may belong to a hitherto unidentified structure shown by John Speed on his Map of Winchester of 1611. The location suggests that this structure and hence the window may have been part of the royal palace built in the centre of Winchester by William the Conqueror by about 1069–70, said by Gerald the Welshman, writing about 1198, to have been second to the palace in London ‘in neither quality nor scale’     

Constantin Frantz and the intellectual history of Bonapartism and Caesarism: a reassessment

The conservative German publicist and political theorist, Constantin Frantz (1817–1891), occupies an ambiguous place in German intellectual history. Some, such as Friedrich Meinecke, located him within the rich intellectual tradition of German federalism, highlighting his hostility to the idea of the “nation-state” and the traditions of nationalism, Realpolitik and militarism. Others, by contrast, have situated him within a long genealogy of German fascism, identifying his remarkable 1852 work, Louis Napoleon, as a kind of precursor or antecedent of twentieth-century fascist ideology. This interpretation raises broader questions about the historiography on Bonapartism and Caesarism, which has often been motivated by an interest in the intellectual origins of modern fascism. The present article supplies a reinterpretation of Frantz’s thinking about Bonapartism (Napoleonismus) and Caesarism by focusing on a much broader range of his intellectual output and by tracking the development of his view of Bonapartism’s significance between 1851 and the early 1870s. The main outcome is not just to question Frantz’s place in the “prehistory” of fascism, but also to show how deeply nineteenth-century debates about Bonapartism were connected to concerns about liberalism, democracy, nationalism and imperialism.     

REVIEW ESSAY: THE FRAGILITY OF CHILDHOOD: GABRIELLE ROY'S CES ENFANTS DE MA VIE

Both Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence have named L.M. Montgomery’s work— particularly her books about Emily—as childhood readings that are central to their development as writers. This essay explores how Montgomery’s three books about Emily—Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, and Emily’s Quest—provide a persisting imaginary that The Diviners by Laurence and Who Do You Think You Are? by Munro reflect.     

Ancients and moderns in medieval music theory: from Guido of Arezzo to Jacobus

ABSTRACT

Medieval discourse about both the theory and practice of music featured much debate about the views of moderni and antiqui from when Guido of Arezzo devised a new way of recording pitch in the early eleventh century to the complaints of Jacobus in the early fourteenth century about new forms of measured music in the ars nova. There was also a shift from a Boethian notion that practical music was a manifestation of cosmic music, towards a more Aristotelian model, that privileged music as sensory experience. That this could have a profound effect on human emotion was articulated by Johannes de Grocheio writing about music c. 1270 and Guy of Saint-Denis soon after 1300 about plainchant. Jacobus, writing in the 1320s, was troubled by this shift in thinking about music not as reflections of transcendent realities, but as sounds of human invention that served to move the soul. He argued that musical patterns should reflect a transcendent harmony that was both cosmic and celestial.     

A few words for Axel Vander: John Banville and the pursuit of deconstruction

The revelations about Paul de Man’s activities in Belgium during the Second World War placed him, and by extension deconstruction, on public trial. The affair gave rise to a series of novels, such as Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992) or Bernhard Schlink’s Homecoming (2008), that dismiss critical theory as ethically bankrupt charlatanism. John Banville’s Shroud (2002) and Ancient Light (2012) place the enigmatic theorist Axel Vander, a figure resembling de Man, in the dock, but these novels form no decisive judgement about his guilt. The texts reflect on memory, mourning, forgetting and responsibility, and about what writing might consign to the future, questions persistently raised by de Man and Jacques Derrida. As such, they might be said to speak to, or “inhabit”, deconstruction, rather than condemning it. This essay traces how Banville reckons with Axel Vander, and pursues the thought of de Man and Derrida, by means of three words: shroud, ash and cleave. These words at once connote concealment, destruction and separation and also preservation, survival and connection. As the discussion suggests, such words testify to the memory work performed by deconstruction.     

The Roots of Terrorist Motivation: Shame,Rage, and Violence in The Brothers Karamazov

Abstract

Dostoevsky's most famous novel dealing with terrorism is his work The Demons. In this first-ever novel about terrorism, he carefully analyzed the various factors that contributed to the rise of modern terrorism. This article argues that Dostoevsky's subsequent novel, The Brothers Karamazov, is equally important in understanding the motivations of individual terrorists. The author argues that The Brothers Karamazov is fundamentally a novel about the rage and violence that are the byproducts of shame and humiliation. If modern counterterrorism policymakers, analysts, and operatives are serious about understanding the fundamental motivations of modern terrorists, it may benefit them to read (or reread) The Brothers Karazamov in this light.     

HISTORY,ANTHROPOLOGY, COLONIALISM,AND THE STUDY OF INDIA

Autobiography of an Archive is a collection of essays by Nicholas B. Dirks written since 1991, preceded by an autobiographical introduction. This review article discusses the collection in relation to Dirks's overall scholarship and the wider intellectual field in which history, anthropology, and colonialism intersect in the study of India. Dirks has written three books: The Hollow Crown (1987), an “ethnohistory” of a “little kingdom” in south India; Castes of Mind (2001), about colonialism, anthropology, and caste in India; and The Scandal of Empire (2006), which discusses the foundations of British imperial sovereignty. In The Hollow Crown and other writings, Dirks significantly contributed to the debate about the “rapprochement” between anthropology and history, which was prominent in the 1980s. But in the 1990s, Dirks thought, the rapprochement ground to a halt; the relationship between anthropology and colonialism then came to the fore, and Castes of Mind, as well as some of these essays, were influential critical studies of colonial anthropology. In recent essays, Dirks has examined the “politics of knowledge” and the postwar development of South Asian area studies in the United States. This article argues that although the relationship between anthropology and history is now rarely debated, historical anthropology has continued to develop since the 1980s. Moreover, anthropologists in general now recognize that history matters, and that colonialism crucially shaped modern society and culture in India, and other former colonial territories. Many of Dirks's conclusions about, for example, Indian kingdoms and caste in colonial discourse, have been criticized by other scholars. Nonetheless, anthropological writing, especially on India, is no longer unhistorical, as it once often was, and Dirks's scholarship has played a valuable part in bringing about this change.     

Troublemakers: Laura Poitras and the problem of dissent

This review article considers three works by the distinguished documentary film‐maker Laura Poitras: My country, my country (2006); The oath (2010); and the recently released Citizenfour (2014), focusing on the whistle‐blower Edward Snowden. Poitras describes these works as a trilogy about American power after 9/11, but they are also about disobedience and resistance, or the problem of dissent. The article argues for the significance (and the virtue) of Poitras's project, as film maker and troublemaker, and for the necessity of what Solzhenitsyn calls civil valour.     

Prophecy and Powerlessness

ABSTRACT

This essay attempts to answer questions faced by social movements about whether “prophetic” struggles for justice are necessarily destined either for failure (if they do not win power) or corruption (if they do). It draws on a neglected work of Martin Buber, Der Gesalbte [The Anointed], in which Buber presents the oral core of the Book of Samuel as originating with the school of the prophet Nathan, for lessons about the promise and danger of attempting to combine prophecy and power.     

‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’: Anthropology and Matriarchy in H. Rider Haggard's She

This essay examines the nineteenth-century debate about an imagined matriarchal past, arguing that it raised significant questions about gender and history. It scrutinizes the interdisciplinary nature of the debate, demonstrating that anthropology and literature intersected in a fraught investigation of ‘mother-rule’. The essay contends that H. Rider Haggard's novel She (1887) engages in complex ways with anthropological visions of a matriarchal past. The work of the major matriarchal theorists, J. J. Bachofen, J. F. McLennan, John Lubbock, and L. H. Morgan, often seen as triumphalist accounts of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, was beset by tensions about gender, power, and temporality, caught between evolutionary meliorism and nostalgia, between a defence of patriarchy and recognition of cultural variability. Haggard's She, the essay argues, exposes and deepens the tensions at the heart of the anthropological narrative. Critics have conventionally read She as a matriarchal dystopia, yet the novel offers an ambivalent dramatization of matriarchy, and is attracted as well as repelled by the matriarchal past embodied in the white African queen Ayesha and her people, the Amahagger. More than a femme fatale, Ayesha is sorceress and scientist, harbinger of life and of death; even her violence unsettles assumptions about gender and power. Haggard's evocation of the Amahaggers’ marriage practices works to question the anthropologists’ hierarchical cultural evolutionism, moving towards an appreciation of plural cultures. The narrative's insistence on cyclical temporalities also disrupts a linear narrative of progress from matriarchy to patriarchy, conveying the potent attractions of a resurgent female past.     

The body-mind of Oscar Wilde's reviews for the Pall Mall Gazette

Little is known about the circumstances of Oscar Wilde's employment by the Pall Mall Gazette, and even less is known about his engagement with its editorial policies. His reviews are often neglected, but when examined are considered in isolation rather than as a contribution to a serial format. The Pall Mall Gazette's structure provides a new context in which to understand Wilde's reviews, which were inevitably shaped by the paper's editorial policies. The paper hired reviewers who could help it maintain a balance between politics and light relief. With an understanding of audience affect and cognition, Wilde employed a range of strategies to manage reader response. The reviews analysed in this article show Wilde exploring the material, and psychological aspects of books and reading.     

The Nor’-Wester and the Saskatchewan Gold Rush

ABSTRACT

This article explores the phenomenon of how news about the discovery of gold on the North Saskatchewan River in British administrated Rupert's Land was propagated by the press in the early 1860s. It tracks the resonance of gold rush news first in the Nor’-Wester, a newspaper published in the Red River Settlement, and then reveals how this paper's coverage was re-published and transmitted across the Anglophone world. The article shows how news about the Saskatchewan gold rush was highly politicised. In the Red River Settlement, editors of the Nor’-Wester sought to spur on the British parliament to implement responsible government in the colony, issuing dire warnings about the potential repercussions of a mass migration to the region and the need to act precipitously. Likewise, in newspapers across North America, editors republished and endorsed news from the Nor’-Wester about the Saskatchewan gold fields to benefit their own communities. But while editors championed the Saskatchewan gold fields to lure potential gold rushers to the region, no large-scale migration to the Northwest occurred. While news about the Saskatchewan gold fields may have been popular across the Anglophone world, it was not actionable. While news reports conveyed the impression that a gold rush was ongoing on the North Saskatchewan River, the reality on the ground did not match the press coverage.     

Art,Transformation, Liberation: Balzac's Eugénie Grandet

Balzac's works about actual artists like Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu have long been studied to derive the author's ideas about the artistic creative process. Eugénie Grandet also deals with art, however, even though there is not a real artist in it. In telling the story of Eugénie and her cousin Charles, Balzac suggests his views on the effects of beauty created by artful arrangement as opposed to the beauty in nature uncrafted by human art.     

The friend,the loner and the independent traveller: Norwegian midlife single women's social identities when on holiday

This article explores the social identities available to Norwegian midlife single women when on holiday. As inherent in their habitus, the social identity of a friend is a way of tackling tourism spaces that accommodate bonding. With friends women feel socially included as tourists and seldom disempowered by the surveillance of the tourist gaze. However, the sustenance of friendships is also about discerning what matters; bonding in holiday spaces contributes to maintaining interpersonal relationships in everyday life. Nevertheless, this social identity also requires that women disidentify with being midlife singles, a strategy which is sometimes problematic. The social identity of the loner is linked to fears of solo holidays. This fear is associated with social exclusion, especially when eating out alone in a resort of an evening. In such spaces women dislike being midlife singles; they feel somehow suppressed by the tourist gaze and become aware of their lack of bonding. The social identity of the independent traveller, however, is about enjoyable solo holidays. It is their way of resisting, contesting and negotiating tourism as about sociability with significant others, thereby transforming habitus and manoeuvring the tourist gaze in public holiday spaces, such as restaurants. It is additionally about positive identification with being a midlife single woman.     

Agamben and the Migrations of Glory

Abstract

In the American political imagination, there is a longstanding and wide-ranging discussion about the separation of church and state. Though Americans argue about whether it should be a ‘‘high wall,’’ or whether certain ‘‘breaches’’ in it might be desirable, they all take ‘‘separation’’ to describe an institutional arrangement. From Giorgio Agamben's perspective, however, ‘‘separation’’ is an image that conceals much more than it reveals about the religious character of the state and the global economy. Agamben traces ‘‘the migrations of glory’’ from church, to state, to global capitalism. For part of this task, Agamben accepts Michel Foucault's diagnostic approach to power. By one reading, certainly, governmentality has us in its grip. But now government itself is overshadowed by the power of global capitalism. While Foucault sought only to make us ‘‘a little less governed,’’ Agamben is interested in a deeper iconoclasm and a greater emancipation. According to Agamben, our less-than-free condition can be illuminated by reflection on: (1) the state of exception and the camp, which are only made possible by a form of idolatry in which the sovereign assumes to themself a power that they should not have; (2) On another of the ‘‘maps’’ drawn by Agamben, however, there is a further ‘‘migration of glory,’’ away from national sovereignty, toward postmodern global capitalism; (3) The Coming Community provides the barest sketch of Agamben's hope for a remedy, while his reading of Paul's Letter to the Romans in The Time that Remains brings a more visible kind of messianic expectation or vocation back into the discussion of political life. A concluding section discusses five sorts of questions that might be put to Agamben about the overall shape of his project.     

Hobbes on the supernatural from The Elements of Law to Leviathan

Hobbes's unusual religious views in his classical work, Leviathan, are often seen as a product of his attempt to reconcile Christianity with his philosophical materialism. Yet given Hobbes's materialistic view in his earlier works too, this explanatory framework alone is not sufficient for grasping distinctive features of Leviathan. This article remedies this lacuna by paying close attention to an understudied aspect of the development of Hobbes's religious theory from The Elements of Law to Leviathan: his treatment of the supernatural and, particularly, of matters of faith known by supernatural revelation as opposed to natural reason. I argue that over time Hobbes developed an epistemological analysis of supernatural revelation and refined his argument about the sense in which matters of faith are supernatural and about the extent to which they are found in the Bible. It was not materialism per se but the more sophisticated analysis of the supernatural in Leviathan that enabled Hobbes to admit the sphere of the supernatural to a much smaller extent than in De Cive and to discuss in detail what he sees as a matter of faith and beyond the scope of philosophy in De Cive.     

Urban law—I

In this essay, I aim to identify and analyze the influence of Cartesian dualism on Rembrandt's pictorial representations of the self. My thesis is that Descartes and Rembrandt share concerns about philosophy's exploration of human nature, concerns rooted in mind–body dualism. Descartes's corpus bears witness to a growing skepticism about the relation between matter and extension. Likewise, Rembrandt's anatomy lessons lead the viewer to question the value of treating humans as scientific objects. I suggest that by reexamining Rembrandt's work in light of the mind–body problem we generate a fuller understanding of Rembrandt's artistic critique and expression and Descartes's mature scientific thinking and abiding influence. My analysis centers on four Rembrandt paintings: The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp (1632); The Descent from the Cross (1632–1633); The Sacrifice of Abraham (1635); and The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Joan Deyman (1656).     

‘A Still Ecstasy of Freedom and Enjoyment’: Walking the City in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

This article situates Charlotte Brontë’s writing within the context of mid-nineteenth-century discourses of gender and travel, and posits that Brontë contributes to the discursive construct of the flâneuse through her writing about women walking the city in her letters from Belgium and in the novel Villette (1853). Through a critical framework drawing together literary historicism on women in the Victorian city and mobility theories of embodied and sensory movement, the analysis reveals how Brontë foregrounds the experience of the body in her writing of women walking, and uses this as a mode through which to explore gendered discourses of mobility, and especially women’s urban walking. It argues that Brontë offers a new model of female urban spectatorship which privileges the body of the flâneuse as the prime site of knowing the city; this positively reconfigures the possibilities for autonomy and agency that urban walking affords, while at the same time making the body a site through which ambivalence about women’s mobility is expressed. The article reveals Charlotte Brontë to be a writer actively engaged with discourses of mobility and modernity that have been overlooked in her work, and situates Brontë as a significant contributor to debates about women and the city. It advances literary histories of city walking by locating Villette as a key participant within the field, and contributes to Brontë studies by revealing new perspectives on the significance of women’s travel in her works.     

Transnational ways of seeing: sexual and national belonging in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I argue that transnational ways of seeing help us apprehend the histories of globalization, immigration and imperialism that frame and make legible cultural productions. Focusing on John Cameron Mitchell's 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has been almost universally received as being about transsexuality, this essay argues that the film is equally about transnationality and specifically about how queer identifications and identities are produced in relation to the nation-state. Hedwig explores the limits of national belonging and the pleasures of US popular culture through the lens of sexual and gender identity, with the ambiguity of the Hedwig's body embodying confusion about legal, political and cultural citizenship. The film identifies and critiques the violences of heteronormative national belonging, yet by reading Hedwig alongside the political and legal histories that make its narrative legible, it becomes apparent that the film's popular reception frequently erases the transnational and imperial histories that undergird and produce sexual identities and identification. I argue that cultural practices do not simply reflect national or queer identifications but also produce them. The fissures between the cultural work of the film itself and of its circulation illustrate how despite the mutual imbrication of sexuality and nationality, transsexuality is sometimes more readily apprehended than is transnationality.