The novel 1984, George Orwell's nightmarish vision of totalitarianism published after the Second World War, remains relevant in the twenty-first century. Orwell's concerns regarding the abuse of ...power, the denial of self, and the eradication of both past and future continue to resonate in contemporary discussions of politics and society. Geographers, however, have directed minimal attention to the spatiality embedded within 1984. Accordingly, in this paper I examine the theoretical implications of space, resistance and discipline as manifest in the novel. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Michel Foucault, I detail how the spatial and temporal control of everyday activities serves to discipline spaces within a totalitarian society. Moreover, I suggest that 1984 illustrates how the production of knowledge through the act of writing may forge spaces of resistance within disciplined spaces. This paper contributes, therefore, in two areas, these being resistance geographies and fictive geographies.
Lowe presents a comparative study of authors George Orwell and Albert Camus. In particular, he explores how each writer's journalistic and political works were shaped by his experiences in World War ...II.
...a second motion was tabled by six Conservative MPs that applauded 'the sincere attempts of the BBC to bring home to the British people the logical and soul-destroying consequences of the surrender ...of their freedom'.29 By Wednesday 15 December, attention was turning towards the issue of the programme's repeat on Thursday evening. Even at the end of 1947, 22,000 television sets were in Class III homes, more than in Class II homes. ...in Class II, given two families of roughly equal economic status but of unequal educational level, those with the lower educational level would be likely to be the ones who bought television sets first.38 Not only was a television an increasingly familiar object in lower socio-economic homes, but it was also considerably more likely to be switched on: 'When questioned as to whether or not they watched a whole night's programmes from 8.30 p.m. to close-down at 10.30 p.m., as many as 91% said yes. Since it involves a semi-darkened room and concentration of eyes and ears, it is particularly crippling for any other activity'.48 And it was this exclusive nature of watching that worried many: radio listening had often been accompanied by another activity, television viewing, with its necessary concentration on a small screen, tended to preclude other pastimes. ...the huge initial demand for copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the wake of the performance and the consistently high demand in the years after imply that Orwell's new readers were drawn, in some measure at least, from these socio-economic groups, the very groups to whom his writing appeals but without, prior to this moment, being particularly appealing.
OUR vanity may be nothing more than eternal human nature. In this issue of the QQ, Stephen Marche reflects on the Bible's ancient warning, one that has been reworked by countless authors throughout ...history.
The Marathon as Disport Dasgupta, Kaushik
Economic and political weekly,
08/2014
Journal Article, Magazine Article
To watch a runner stretch his or her physical limits to finish a race and then savour the moment in extreme fatigue represents sport at its non-competitive best. Modern sports events give spectators ...the feeling of having participated in the contest, with live TV coverage fuelling the competitive spirit and contributing to an imaginary war. Even if he doesn't break the time he'd hoped for, as long as he has the sense of satisfaction at having done his very best - and, possibly, having made some significant discovery about himself in the process - then that in itself is an accomplishment, a positive feeling he can carry over to the next race."
Language use in public health Razum, Oliver; Mittal, Onkar; Priya, Ritu ...
The Lancet,
06/2004, Volume:
363, Issue:
9427
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Doublethink can mislead even experienced public-health practitioners. An example is the term "post-eradication immunization policy" for poliomyelitis.2 It describes preventive strategies, such as ...routine immunisation with inactivated polio vaccine in low-income and middle-income countries, which will have to be implemented once the eradication of poliomyelitis has been achieved.3 "Eradication", as defined by WHO, is the "achievement of a status whereby no further cases of a disease occur anywhere, and continued control measures are unnecessary".4 By definition, in a post-eradication scenario, there will be no further need for any strategy against either poliomyelitis or poliovirus. In short, there is no such thing as a "post-eradication immunization policy".
This dissertation is a study of time and action in the work of Heinrich von Kleist and Franz Kafka. I argue that these authors are linked by a shared interest in the poetic and practical implications ...of retroactivity, a term indicating the deliberate modification of the past in the present. My thesis is that Kleist and Kafka understood the present as a window of opportunity in relation to the past, in which action can effect a difference between what was and what will have been. Careful study reveals a marked emphasis in their writings on moments in which time and action constitute vectors running in opposed directions: instances of reversal, arrest, and annulment, in which a later action overtakes and undoes a previous one. Significantly, this occurs through an apparent inversion of conventional chronological sequence, raising fundamental questions about the nature of the relationship between time, action, and the event. Although I develop my argument through engagements with well-known figures from the philosophy of time, ranging from Augustine and Aquinas to Heidegger and Benjamin, the emphasis on action distinguishes my project from traditional studies of time and literature. These tend to emphasize either narrative time as vehicle for meaning-making or aesthetic objects as records of historical variations in subjective experiences of time. I show, by contrast, that Kleist and Kafka conceived of time in terms of its relation to possible action, as an emergent property of a concrete situation, shaped by intersubjective desires, force fields of power relations, and the material and communicative contexts in which these play out. In this study, particular attention has been given to the role of media in Kleist’s and Kafka’s thought and works, as an important, historically-variable factor in the relationship between time, action, and event. Recent scholarship has demonstrated these two authors’ exceptional interest in contemporary and historical technologies for storing, processing, and transmitting information, ranging from electric telegraphy and print periodicals to bureaucratic filing procedures and insurance technologies. I contend that, insofar as these technologies affect how events are recorded, stored, and perceived, they served Kleist and Kafka as the horizon against which forms of retroactivity could and did take place. In keeping with the theoretical emphasis on situation-specific temporalities of action, each of the dissertation’s four chapters adopts the model of a case-study: a concrete account of retroactivity is derived by reading a major literary work against the background of unacknowledged intertexts, historical discourse formations, medium-specific temporalities, and biographical entanglements. The first chapter explores themes of speed and secrecy in the context of Kleist’s Die Marquise von O..., whose protagonist repeatedly attempts to overtake and intercept news of his own deeds before others learn of them. Close reading, combined with analysis of Kleist’s writings on journalistic propaganda, the history of the print periodical known as the Intelligenzblatt, and the tactical innovations of the Second Coalition War, has allowed me to uncover a systematic logic of concealment, dissemblance, and reversal at work in the text and in Kleist’s thought more broadly. Additionally, I have for the first time identified the historical model for the novella’s protagonist, Count F. The second chapter nuances this account of secrecy and reversal through a reading of Kleist’s comedy Der zerbrochne Krug. Comparison with literary intertexts like Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure , coupled with analysis of theological accounts of time, vision, and the Fall of Man in Augustine, Aquinas, and Leibniz, allows me to reconstruct a theory and temporality of finite vision in Kleist, and a theatrical poetics of the blind spot. I also reveal an unsuspected degree of legal-historical knowledge on Kleist’s part, where variations in trial format and the media of jurisprudence are deployed to reflect on temporal paradoxes of legal judgment and restorative justice. The third chapter unfolds an investigation of Kleist’s innovative but short-lived daily newspaper, the Berliner Abendblätter. Working with the original printing of the Abendblätter and extensive archival source material, I have discovered a consistent strategy of re-editing that allows the author and editor Kleist, through concatenations of implausible printer’s errors, retractions, updates, and modifications to source materials, to both precipitate and reverse political crises. Comparison with Kleist’s fictional works and erratic biography allows for a broader conceptualization of the relationship between crisis, deadline, and survival in his work. A final chapter contains an extended study of the temporality of bureaucracy in Kafka’s Das Schloß. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)
Popular Music and the Space of Englishness examines representations of England mediated by popular music in 20th century British texts and argues that this conjunction enables a re-imagining of the ...space of the nation. While these texts fit into a larger context of British culture, I center their depictions of Englishness (rather than Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) in order to illustrate the complicated process of constructing national identity through the narration of specific places, rather than through citizenship, race, ethnicity, or appeals to cultural tradition. Instead, this spatial orientation imagines Englishness as a cultural phenomenon shaped by numerous, sometimes competing social factors as well as aesthetic questions about representation and significance. I read texts that depict aesthetic crises, in which the nation as a problem of representation threatens the text's very coherence; music, I argue, helps to solve these crises and establish a degree of interpretive stability. However, this open-endedness and re-imagination does not automatically translate to a more progressive or inclusive Englishness, and can perpetuate the blind spots, exclusions, and indifferences of the very discourses they tried to remake. Nonetheless, the nexus of music, space, and nation dramatizes the mediated, overdetermined cultural life of Englishness as it takes shape in the development of musical genres and in narratives of the street, the city, the road trip, and the music studio. More specifically, I argue that the depictions of street music in Dorothy Richardson's Pointed Roofs and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale undermine their texts' representations of classical music listening or pop song sing-alongs; that Colin MacInnes's Absolute Beginners and John Akomfrah's Handsworth Songs provide narratives of the singular city gradually, even reluctantly, incorporating another city, sometimes in spite of music and sometimes through it; that Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man!and J.B. Priestley's The Good Companions constitute road narratives that only loosely adhere to the picaresque genre and instead require the help of music to establish significance and closure; and that Linton Kwesi Johnson's and P.J. Harvey's musical identifications with place ground themselves in studio experimentation that can paradoxically chip away at their own positioning.
This dissertation explores the potential of fiction to create existential history as a contemplation of the past that seeks not to explain it but to bring it to life again. There are two guiding ...questions: first, what does history feel like?; and, second, how does fiction illuminate that experience by means inaccessible to history? My analysis folds over two sets of Peninsular Spanish texts separated by about a century: the short fiction of Spain’s prolific early 20th-century thinker Miguel de Unamuno, and the contemporary novels of Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, with interventions from John Dos Passos (Chapter 2) and Javier Marías (Chapter 3). The first chapter, “Personality as Historical Truth in Unamuno,” sets the stage by examining the implications of a statement lifted from one of Unamuno’s short stories: “No hay más verdadera historia que la novela . . .” Using this idea as a springboard, I propose a reading of Unamuno’s most popular story, San Manuel Bueno, mártir , that is at odds with the most prominent scholarship but, I argue, in harmony with Unamuno’s own intimations, significantly in the jointly-published “Don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez.” In the second chapter, I argue that novels function well as existential history because they drop readers into a space of potentiality, where ethical choices must be made without knowledge of eventual consequences. The idea of potentiality comes to the forefront in the two primary texts considered: Martínez de Pisón’s Enterrar a los muertos and El día de mañana, set, respectively, during the Spanish Civil War and Transition periods. The third chapter looks at fiction’s potential to recreate the physical realities of embodied experience, specifically family connections of inheritance and legacy. I consider the difference between memory (internal interaction with the past, from within a body) and history (interaction with the past that always has an external communicative function) in relation to family legacy, family homes, and the metaphor of the mirror as it relates to interactions between family members. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on embodiment and the sensory dimensions of Being inform my analysis throughout the chapter.
Imagining Pleasure argues that aesthetic pleasure is fundamental to the circulation of racial meaning in twentieth-century literature and visual culture in the U.S. Focusing on literature, film, and ...visual art produced by women and queer people of color, Imagining Pleasure examines the ways in which formal experimentation expands the repertoire of feelings associated with race. It argues that aesthetic pleasure is crucial to antiracist politics, enabling survival in periods defined by crisis and threat, facilitating coalition and solidarity across difference, and empowering subjects to imagine just social formations. This interdisciplinary project draws from work in critical race studies, affect theory, and queer theory, including work by Saidiya Hartman, José Esteban Muñoz, Sianne Ngai, and Audre Lorde. Examining a diverse selection of literary and visual texts, from Nella Larsen’s Passing to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée to Glenn Ligon’s text paintings, Imagining Pleasure highlights the intimacy of affect and form at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality. It asks: how does art create coalition if not through recognition and catharsis? How do we distinguish between the shared feeling that ruptures oppression and heals trauma and feelings that reproduce trauma and uphold oppression? What are the material effects of an aesthetic pleasure which is not the slippery interpersonal projections of identification or the rehearsal of familiar narratives of psychic resolution? Thus, this project challenges conventional assumptions regarding the relationship between pleasure, form, racial meaning, and social change. Imagining Pleasure contends that experimentalist aesthetics articulate the limits and possibilities of pleasure for social and political life. This project imagines that aesthetic pleasure may be more than fetish, escape, or political instrument, but a political end that enables antiracist feeling.
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