“Ceci n’est pas un fragment”: Identity,Intertextuality and Fictionality in Sappho’s “Brothers Poem”

In this article, Sappho’s Brothers Poem is re-evaluated and analysed from various perspectives that have not been addressed sufficiently in scholarship so far. First, some questions of principle regarding the role of the brothers and the Sapphic speaker are discussed. Secondly, the poem’s communicative situation is examined, and different options for the identification of the person addressed as “you” are considered. Thirdly, it is demonstrated how the poem establishes an intertextual dialogue with the Homeric Odyssey on various levels, and how this dialogue affects the general understanding of the poem. Finally, the commonly held view that the five transmitted stanzas do not represent the entire poem is challenged. The article concludes with some wider considerations about some of the most common assumptions regarding the nature and the fragmentary state of the Brothers Poem.     

Academic Journals in the Digital Age: An Editor’s Perspective

The contributors to this forum each reflect on a particular aspect of the future of academic publishing. James Mussell outlines how the form of the online academic journal, and in particular ongoing use of pdf, remains resistant to the potential that the digital environment can offer. Lucinda Matthews-Jones continues the conversation by explaining how journal blogs, such as JVC Online, act as digital spaces that facilitate more creative engagement with multimedia and which allow authors to foster and to interact with new and often broader networks of readers. Finally, Helen Rogers surveys the current landscape of academic publishing and urges us, as scholars, to move beyond the traditional schema and embrace the potential that Web 2.0 can offer. As more and more of our scholarly lives are lived online, the investment of the scholarly journal in print culture becomes apparent. These essays recognize the value of longevity, of scholarship’s commitment to both the past and the future, but they also suggest that scholarly publication needs to attend more closely to the times in which it is published.     

‘An Old Carriage with New Horses’: Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy

Debates about Nietzsche's political thought today revolve around his role in contemporary democratic theory: is he a thinker to be mined for stimulating resources in view of refounding democratic legitimacy on a radicalised, postmodern and agonistic footing, or is he the modern arch-critic of democracy budding democrats must hone their arguments against? Moving away from this dichotomy, this article asks first and foremost what democracy meant for Nietzsche in late nineteenth-century Germany, and on that basis what we might learn from him now. To do so, it will pay particular attention to the political, intellectual and cultural contexts within which Nietzsche's thought evolved, namely Bismarck's relationship to the new German Reichstag, the philological discovery of an original Aryan race, and Nietzsche's encounter with Gobineau's racist thought through his frequentation of the Wagner circle. It argues that Nietzsche's most lasting contribution to democratic thinking is not to be found in the different ways he may or may not be used to buttress certain contemporary ideological positions, but rather how his notions of ‘herd morality’, ‘misarchism’ and the genealogical method still provides us with the conceptual tools to better understand the political world we inhabit.     

“Twitter Bodhisattva”: Ai Weiwei’s Media Politics

Abstract

This article investigates artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s media politics. In 1997 Ai Weiwei imagined a modernist movement that would practise a “non-compromising vigilance on society and power” and since 2005 he has embraced blogging and micro-blogging to enact such intent. We argue that his “communication activism” is part of a broader artistic and political program that long predates his online presence. The study examines how the artist has experimented with blogging and micro-blogging to spread his message of “awakening” in defiance of censorship and surveillance. It shows how Ai Weiwei’s communication strategy combines an international celebrity status, criticism, irony and a round-the-clock interaction with his netizen audience and the media. It also critiques the effectiveness and coherence of this mode of activism from two perspectives – namely, Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of “private telematics” and Jodi Dean’s “blog theory” – and finally assesses its impact. The study aims to enhance our understanding of the web-based communication strategies of Chinese activists, shedding light on cultural production and consumption in Chinese cyberspace as a socio-political barometer.     

The Mystery of St Cuthbert’s Ducks: An Adventure in Hagiography

‘St Cuthbert’s duck’ is a folk name for the common eider (Somateria mollissima). The saint’s affinity for the black-and-white ducks has been accepted uncritically for centuries. For such a well-documented saint, however, his ducks are strangely absent from early records. His near-contemporary hagiographers, including the Venerable Bede, make no mention of waterfowl. The enduring association begins almost five centuries after his death in a piece of twelfth-century folklorismus.     

Beyond Metrics: Reappraising York’s Hungate “Slum”

Much of the excitement generated in Britain since 2007 by the York Archaeological Trust’s excavations of the city’s Hungate neighborhood, which Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree characterized as a “slum” in his pioneering poverty survey of 1901, derives from the unexpected volume and variety of material evidence uncovered about life in a poor community within a modern industrial city. Such material evidence and its often uncertain relationships to other historical data can enhance analysis by complicating understanding of the past, rather than echoing conventional wisdom. Findings from Hungate can thus contribute to nuanced understandings of urban social disadvantage not only at the neighborhood level in this one particular British city, but at the larger scales of analysis that encompass the growth of cities and interacting urban regions in Britain and around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These understandings have contemporary relevance for a world in which over half of humanity now lives in urban areas, as misconceptions about “slums” continue to undermine efforts to reduce urban inequality.     

An analysis of Islamic State’s Dabiq magazine

This article analyses Dabiq magazine to explore the strategic logic of Islamic State (IS) appeals to English-speaking Muslims. It offers the field a conceptual framework through which to analyse IS’s communications strategy and a top-down empirical study of Dabiq’s contents. This paper argues that Dabiq appeals to its audiences by strategically designing in-group identity, Other, solution and crisis constructs which it leverages via value-, crisis- and dichotomy-reinforcing narratives. By fusing identity- and rational-choice appeals, IS provides its audiences with a powerful ‘competitive system of meaning’ that is designed to shape its readership’s perceptions, polarise their support and drive their radicalisation.     

The religious geography of Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode”: popery,presbytery, and parti-coloured picts

ABSTRACT

Marvell’s “Ode” (1650) is an English poem about a British problem – a problem further problematized by religion. The “Ode” lauds Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns, but English responses to these “colonial” wars were in reality complicated by protestant infighting among presbyterians, independents, and sectarians. Writers like Milton and Nedham rallied English support for Cromwell’s Irish campaign by recycling Spenserian stereotypes of Irish catholic barbarity. But Milton and Nedham also undercut English protestant unity by flinging these same anti-catholic stereotypes at Scottish presbyterians in Belfast and Edinburgh. Departing from previous studies, this article argues that Marvell’s “Ode” eschews Milton and Nedham’s anti-Presbyterianism in ways calculated to elide, rather than divide, protestant communities. The article explores how the “Ode” presents Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns as exclusively anti-catholic (rather than anti-presbyterian) crusades, comparing Marvell’s presentation of Cromwell in the “Ode” with his identification of Cromwell as an anti-catholic crusader in “First Anniversary” (1655). Both poems anticipate in this respect Marvell’s later anti-catholic, but pro-nonconformist, approach to Ireland in Rehearsal transpros’d (1672–1673). The article is therefore concerned to root Marvell’s post-Restoration commitment to protestant tolerationism within the anti-catholic language of the “Ode”.     

Alice Munro’s Narrative Historicism: “Too Much Happiness”

Alice Munro’s “Too Much Happiness” relates the final years of its subject Sophia Kovalevsky (1850–1891), a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician, writer, and subsequent feminist icon. Munro’s narrative here does not always fit with her earlier fictional practice. By examining Munro’s earlier work, and glancing at a later sequence of narratives with regard to her uses of historical matters, this discussion outlines the generic implications of “Too Much Happiness” and their effect upon our estimation of the remainder of Munro’s fiction.     

Tradition as play: pilgrimage to “England’s Nazareth”

This article explores the “invention of tradition” thesis by examining the physical and ideological reconstruction, as well as the contemporary use, of the Christian pilgrimage site of Walsingham, in Norfolk, England. We argue that a focus on the actions and motivations of cultural élites encourages a one‐dimensional view of ritual and ignores how traditions may be transformed in the process of re‐enactment by other members of society.     

“Verily the Road was Built with Chinaman’s Bones”: An Archaeology of Chinese Line Camps in Montana

Transcontinental railroads conveyed information and resources that fueled the Gilded Age’s quintessential financial and political corporate corruption and related social inequalities. Construction of the transcontinentals required massive numbers of laborers who lived in temporary “line camps” along the railroad grades. A sample of spatially and ethnically segregated Chinese line camps along the transcontinental Northern Pacific Railroad in the Rocky Mountains of northwestern Montana provide historical and archaeological examples of the Gilded Age’s pervasive racist mistreatment of the Chinese, culminating in Chinese exclusion laws.