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Tropes
Selected AbstractsThe Poetics of Pathology: Freud's Studien über Hysterie and the Tropes of the ,Novelle'GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 1 2006Petra Rau Freud's self-conscious reflections on the ,Novelle' in his first major work, Studien über Hysterie, have sometimes been interpreted as rhetorical remarks in which his writerly ambitions came to the surface. This article argues that the case histories of hysteria and the genre of the ,Novelle' (particularly the psychopathic or psychographic nineteenth-century ,Novelle') share a poetics of pathology. Indeed their common features (dependence on symbolic condensation, central traumatic events and narrative gaps, exegetical challenges and hermeneutic paradoxes, the self-reflexive narrator, framing devices) suggest that the psychopathic ,Novelle' provided Freud with the means to legitimise his representation of psychoanalysis and hysteria. Like the case history, the psychopathic ,Novelle' is concerned with validating and interpreting idiosyncratic pathological semiotics. Yet like the ,Novelle', Freud's case histories suffer from a contagion in which representation is infected with, and by necessity performs, the pathologies it claims to map and cure. This article suggests that at the heart of the poetics of pathology is a hermeneutic aporia that allows for intertextual transfer but that also deconstructs the novellesque as well as the psychoanalytic project and renders it impossible. [source] Homoeroticism and the Liberated Woman as Tropes of Subversion: Grete Weil's Literary ProvocationsTHE GERMAN QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2005Pascale R. Bos First page of article [source] ,The Perfect Business': Human Trafficking and Lao,Thai Cross-Border MigrationDEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 5 2010Sverre Molland ABSTRACT Over the past few years some governments and development organizations have increasingly articulated cross-border mobility as ,trafficking in persons'. The notion of a,market,where traffickers prey on the ,supply' of migrants that flows across international borders to meet the ,demand' for labour has become a central trope among anti-trafficking development organizations. This article problematizes such,economism,by drawing attention to the oscillating cross-border migration of Lao sex workers within a border zone between Laos and Thailand. It illuminates the incongruity between the recruitment of women into the sex industry along the Lao,Thai border and the market models that are employed by the anti-trafficking sector. It discusses the ways in which these cross-border markets are conceived in a context where aid programming is taking on an increasingly important role in the politics of borders. The author concludes that allusions to ideal forms of knowledge (in the guise of classic economic theory) and an emphasis on borders become necessary for anti-trafficking programmes in order to make their object of intervention legible as well as providing post-hoc rationalizations for their continuing operation. [source] Wittgenstein as Exile: A philosophical topography1EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY, Issue 5 2008Michael A. PetersArticle first published online: 22 AUG 200 Abstract This paper argues that Wittgenstein considered himself an exile and indeed was a self-imposed exile from his native Vienna; that this condition of exile is important for understanding Wittgenstein the man and his philosophy; and that exile as a condition has become both a central characteristic condition of late modernity (as much as alienation was for the era of industrial capitalism) and emblematic of literary modernism. The paper employs the notion of ,exhilic thought' as a central trope for understanding Wittgenstein and the topography or geography of his thought and suggests that philosophy might begin to recognize more fully the significance of location and place in order to come to terms internationalization, multiculturalism and globalization, and with postmodern notions of subjectivity that embrace aspects of the condition of being an exile. [source] OF SAILORS AND POETS: ON CELAN, GRÜNBEIN, AND BRODSKYGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 3 2007Michael Eskin ABSTRACT In this essay, I trace the metamorphoses of the trope of poetry as ,message in a bottle' in the works of Paul Celan, Durs Grünbein, and Joseph Brodsky. Beginning from a juxtaposition of Osip Mandelstam's conception of the poetic text as a ,letter in a bottle' with Bertolt Brecht's depiction of lyric poetry as ,Flaschenpost' in light of their conceptual discrepancies, I inquire into the different ways in which three of Brecht's and, above all, Mandelstam's most notable successors , Celan, Grünbein, and Brodsky , have appropriated and deployed the trope in response to their singular socio-historical situations. Through a number of close readings of contextually relevant texts (including Celan's Bremen Prize Speech, Grünbein's discussion of Celan and Mandelstam as avatars of what he calls the ,new Robinson', and Brodsky's programmatic poem, ,Letter in a Bottle'), I disclose important differences, poetic and ethical, between Celan's, Grünbein's, and Brodsky's (and, by extension, others') recourse to the ostensibly monosemous figure of poetry as ,Flaschenpost', as it was signally launched, in the twentieth century, by Mandelstam in particular. [source] Traces of the FlâneuseJOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION, Issue 1 2006From Roman Holiday to Lost In Translation This article critically considers the trope of the nineteenth-century flâneur/flâneuse as found in two films: Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) and Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003). Both films construct a traditional narrative from the adventures of a single female protagonist as she negotiates urban space. In tracing the references to the flâneur/the flanuese as found in these two films, one can begin to map a certain trajectory of contemporary gender relations in respect to urban space from the post,World War II era to the present, as well as to understand the context in which the "city" itself is seen as a site for such transformations. [source] "What do you think of female chastity?"JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 4 2006Identity, Loyalty in the National Security State Focusing on the formative texts and practices underpinning the rise of the national security state in America, while alluding to more recent developments, the article claims that security and identity are inextricably linked, not just in the obvious existential ways, but also in a far more political way: that the fabrication of national security goes hand in hand with the fabrication of national identity, and vice versa. Extending well beyond the question of patriotism as a security trope, this ,identity' permeates the worlds of sexuality and domesticity. To make this case the article pinpoints loyalty as a key political technology for simultaneously gauging identity and reaffirming security, thereby unearthing what might be called a security-identity-loyalty complex. [source] Places and Spaces: The Role of Metonymy in Organizational TalkJOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES, Issue 8 2004Gill Musson abstract Cultural meaning making as reflected in, and constituted by, organizational talk is an established field of interest in organizational analysis. However, the discursive mechanics of the process whereby this cultural meaning making is created and maintained are less well understood. The premise of this paper is that taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in organizational talk can be explored through the analysis of metonymy, a trope which is under explored in the linguistic turn in organization studies. This lack of focus on metonymy is, we believe, related to the fundamentally conventional nature of the trope in use, which expresses ideas, values and relationships that seem natural, normal and routine but which are culturally bound. We address this gap and carry out a metonymical analysis of organizational talk about physical places and spaces in one organization, to show how cultural norms and meanings are reflected, maintained, and potentially changed in these figures of speech. We show how metonymic chains based on buildings can reflect, reify and simplify the symbolic order of the organization, how these symbolic meanings can be transferred on to other inanimate objects and the constructions thereby spread, how people can be constructed within this symbolic chain, and how these metonymic chains can be invoked to potentially confirm, challenge or change the organizational order. [source] Deceptive Utopias: Violence, Environmentalism, and the Regulation of Multiculturalism in ColombiaLAW & POLICY, Issue 3 2009DIANA BOCAREJO Multiculturalism, constructed as a liberal utopia intended to recognize marginal populations, commonly draws upon deceptive mechanisms that reify the old trope of anthropological "savage slots" (a term borrowed from Trouillot 2003). Such slots configure the relationship between politics and places: the fixation of ethnicity in a territory and the creation of strong frontiers,both physical and symbolic,between grantees and nongrantees of differential citizenships. In the case analyzed in this article, those frontiers reify the distinction between peasants and indigenous peoples; two group categories widely mobilized in the context of indigenous land expansion in the northern region of Colombia (South America). This article explores how an environmental "utopic space" used by state institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), has turned into a fetish that hides a segment of Colombia's most dramatic reality: the violent context wherein paramilitary threats force small peasant landholders to sell and leave their land. [source] Re-Reading Rudyard Kipling's ,English' Heroism: Narrating Nation in The Jungle BookORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 3 2001Jopi Nyman This essay explores the construction of colonial English national identity in a text not always read in the context of its author's imperial project. Since Kipling's The Jungle Book has been relegated to the category of children's fiction and is today usually read in its Disneyfied version, its constructions of nation, race and class in colonial space, exposed through its narrations of local inhabitants (both animals and humans), have not attracted the attention that they deserve. I will argue that the stories' racialized and interrelated images of Indian children and animals contribute to an imagining of Englishness as a site of power and racial superiority. While the stories appear to narrate an Indian space, the images and constructions of nation produced stem from an understanding of Englishness as a site of colonial authority. Thus it is argued that Kipling's colonial animals map a racialized contrastive space where national identity is inseparable from racial identity, leading Kipling finally to abandon the colonial animal in order to be able to represent proper Englishness. While Kipling constructs colonial animals as racialized Others by writing monkeys and snakes in his jungle sketches, he also promotes ,truly English' identities in the nationalist allegory of "The White Seal". Indeed, all animals are not equal but they too are represented in racialized and nationed terms, which points to the flexibility of the animal trope in colonial discourse. [source] Scandalous Family Relations: Dealing with Darwinism in Wilhelm Raabe's Der LarTHE GERMAN QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2008Silke Brodersen This article discusses Wilhelm Raabe's 1889 story Der Lar as an important and long overlooked literary response to the cultural debate on Darwinism. It argues that the text conducts a narrative experiment that places a Darwinian object (a stuffed gibbon) at the center of a constellation of characters who interact with it in different ways, thereby drawing it into a broad cultural and philosophical discussion. As the ape becomes a figure of reflection for constructing the characters' identities in the story, it also serves as a trope for exploring the impact of Darwinism on bourgeois values and for discussing the proper relationship between science and literature in realism. Ultimately, Der Lar works towards a reconciliation of abstract theory with individual narrative and undertakes a critical assessment of the relevance of science in everyday human life. [source] Places Of Transformation: Building Monuments From Water And Stone In The Neolithic Of The Irish SeaTHE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 1 2003CHRIS FOWLER Using the Irish Sea area as a case-study, we argue that both sites and landscapes can be understood as containing a series of components procured from the landscape and from human, animal, and object bodies. These components were organized in a way that commented on and related to specific cultural relationships between these different locations and through the substances found within them. This idea is explored by examining Neolithic monuments, material culture, and natural materials in southwest Wales, northwest Wales, the Isle of Man, and southwest Scotland. We trace some metaphorical schemes which were integral to Neolithic activity in this part of the Irish Sea. In particular, we highlight the metaphorical connections between water and stone in places associated with transformation, particularly the repeated transformation of human bodies. We suggest that the series of associations present in the Neolithic were not invested with a uniform meaning but, instead, were polyvalent, subject to conflicting interpretations, contextually specific and variable through both space and time. The relationship between these elements was therefore dependent on the contexts of their association. Nevertheless, the association of water and stone can be found repeatedly throughout the Neolithic world and may have been the medium of a powerful trope within broader conceptions of the world. This article is intended as a preliminary consideration of these issues (particularly the links between stone, mountains, water, quartz, shell, and human remains) and is offered as a thinking-point for ongoing research in this area. [source] Victims and Martyrs: Converging Histories of Violence in Amazonian Anthropology and U.S. CinemaANTHROPOLOGY & HUMANISM, Issue 1 2009Casey High SUMMARY Since the 1950s, indigenous Waorani people of Amazonian Ecuador have had a prominent place in the evangelical imagination in the United States and Europe because of their reputation for violence. Their symbolic status as "wild" Indians in popular imagination reached its peak in 1956, when five U.S. missionaries were killed during an attempt to convert the Waorani to Christianity. With the opening of a U.S.-produced film in January 2006 about the history of Waorani spear killing, entitled End of the Spear, Waorani violence has become part of a truly global imagination. In juxtaposing the film's Christian-inspired narrative with Waorani oral histories of violence, this article explores how indigenous ideas about predation and victimhood are related to the trope of martyrdom that has become prominent in Christian representations of the Waorani since the 1950s. It suggests that visual media such as popular film hold the potential to recontextualize ethnographic representations and allow us to rethink the ways in which Amazonian cosmologies are related to sociopolitical processes that transcend the temporal and spatial boundaries of ethnographic fieldwork. More generally, the article argues that new anthropological knowledge can be produced through the combination of fieldwork and attention to less conventional sources, such as historical missionary narratives and popular cinema. [source] Classicism, Enlightenment and the ,Other': thoughts on decoding eighteenth,century visual cultureART HISTORY, Issue 3 2002Maiken UmbachArticle first published online: 22 DEC 200 Cultural historians have been slow to respond to the pictorial turn. They often find images too ambiguous to use as sources in their own right. This problem is aggravated by two characteristics shared by early modern and postmodern visual culture: both transgress boundaries of genre (such as the text/image divide), and both tend to be notoriously fluid and plural in terms of their ,message'. The nineteenth,century Idealist notion of ,art', by contrast, celebrates unity of style and content, and tolerates multiple meanings only where they can be resolved in dialectical synthesis. This legacy continues to prevent us from understanding visual evidence which conforms to neither requirement. Drawing on readings of the contemporary landscape art of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Cy Twombly, this article proposes a new approach to visual culture of pre,Idealist periods, for which ambiguous allusive fields and transgressions of genre were constitutive. The eighteenth century's use of classical culture is a case in point, here exemplified by a close reading of the multi-layered trope of Arcadia. The conclusions that emerge from this reading call into question negative assumptions about the Enlightenment's dogmatic rationalism which have dominated historiography from Romanticism to postmodernism. The ,image,texts, of the eighteenth century destabilized hegemonic rationality without promoting its opposite, instead integrating the ,other' into a self,reflexive and self,critical Enlightenment ideology. [source] Trope Control: The Costs and Benefits of Metaphor Unreliability in the Description of Empirical Phenomena,BRITISH JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2004John Ramsay The process of communicating and interpreting the meaning of metaphors in business writing is deeply unreliable. This stems from the structure of metaphors in which some of the characteristics of a source domain are transferred to a target domain. The precise selection of characteristics is made by the reader rather than the author of the metaphor, thus creating uncertainty of meaning. Although there are some benefits stemming from the inherent ambiguity of metaphor, the unreliability of the trope not only makes it impossible to choose between competing metaphors, but may distort our view of reality and thus lead to poor management decision-making. Moreover, the unreliability of the interpretation process is so pronounced that some authors have attempted to reject the use of metaphor entirely. However, this paper argues that although it is impossible to avoid employing metaphor, contrary to the conventional wisdom in this subject area, it is possible to improve meaning reliability. Drawing on linguistic theory to explain the recommendations, and illustrative examples from business literature and practice, the papers offers several recommendations for so doing that may be applied throughout the Business and Management field. [source] Hybridity in Cultural GlobalizationCOMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 3 2002Marwan M. Kraidy Hybridity has become a master trope across many spheres of cultural research, theory, and criticism, and one of the most widely used and criticized concepts in postcolonial theory. This article begins with a thorough review of the interdisciplinary scholarship on hybridity. Then it revisits the trope of hybridity in the context of a series of articles on cultural globalization published in the Washington Post in 1998. This series on "American Popular Culture Abroad" appropriates hybridity to describe the global reception of U.S. American popular culture. Due to the controversy surrounding hybridity, the discourse woven into these articles invites a critical deconstruction. A discussion of the implications of hybridity's conceptual ambiguity follows. Finally, this article makes the case that hybridity is a conceptual inevitability, and proposes an intercontextual theory of hybridity, which comprehends global cultural dynamics by articulating hybridity and hegemony, providing an initial theoretical platform for a critical cultural transnationalism. [source] SPECTACLES OF SEXUALITY: Televisionary Activism in NicaraguaCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2008CYMENE HOWE ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of "televisionary" activism,a mediated form of social justice messaging that attempts to transform culture. Focusing on a locally produced and very popular television show in Nicaragua, I consider how social justice knowledge is produced through television characters' scripting and performance. The ideological underpinnings aspire to a dialogic engagement with the audience, as producers aim to both generate public discourse and benefit from audiences' suggestions and active engagement. Several levels of media advocacy interventions are considered including the production, scripting, and translation of transnational material into local registers. Televisionary activism offers challenges to several conservative social values in Nicaragua by placing topics such as abortion, domestic violence, sexual abuse, homosexuality, and lesbianism very explicitly into the public sphere. At the same time, sexual subjects on the small screen must be framed in particular ways, as, for instance, with the homosexual subjects who are carefully coiffed in normalized human dramas. Finally, many of these televisionary tactics draw from and engage with transnational tropes of identity politics, and "gay" and "lesbian" subjectivity in particular, confounding the relationship between real and idealized sexual subjects in Nicaragua. That is, these televisionary tactics "market" transnational identity politics but derive legitimacy through their very "localness." [source] Defending Contingentism in MetaphysicsDIALECTICA, Issue 1 2009Kristie Miller Metaphysics is supposed to tell us about the metaphysical nature of our world: under what conditions composition occurs; how objects persist through time; whether properties are universals or tropes. It is near orthodoxy that whichever of these sorts of metaphysical claims is true is necessarily true. This paper looks at the debate between that orthodox view and a recently emerging view that claims like these are contingent, by focusing on the metaphysical debate between monists and pluralists about concrete particulars. This paper argues that we should be contingentists about monism and pluralism, and it defends contingentism against some necessitarian objections by offering an epistemology of contingent metaphysical claims. [source] Elizabeth I as StepmotherENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2009Jacqueline Vanhoutte As a number of scholars have shown, Tudor male subjects were able to arrogate to themselves unprecedented powers by playing gender against class hierarchies. This essay considers how tropes of surrogacy furthered this process of political enfranchisement. As Victor Turner suggests, recurrent tropes are dynamic phenomena, which change meaning over time in a way that reveals the "emotional and volitional dimensions" present in social contexts. The prevalence of surrogate mothers in Elizabethan political and literary discourses reflects such a volitional dimension: writers (e.g. Lyly and Shakespeare), courtiers (e.g., Sir Philip Sidney), and politicians (e.g. members of Parliament) used images of stepmothers in consciously manipulative ways. Because of the ambiguous nature of figurative language, these men posited innovative ideas indirectly long before it became possible to articulate them directly. The evil stepdames of Tudor lore form an important precedent for John Locke's enlightened "foster father," whose acquired authority undermines the divine rights of fathers and kings. Stepmother tropes provided an alternative to the dominant analogies between family and state,analogies that aimed at suppressing disobedience and rebellion and at naturalizing the status quo. While men like Sidney and John Stubbs probably intended only limited applications for their stepmother tropes, this essay shows that these tropes called their monarch's absolute rule into question and justified their own political activity. Elizabethan writers thus contributed to the process of unmooring the English monarchy from divine right ideology, a process that culminated, intellectually speaking, in Locke's insistence on the consensual nature of government. (J.V.) [source] The Burning of Sampati Kuer: Sati and the Politics of Imperialism, Nationalism and Revivalism in 1920s IndiaGENDER & HISTORY, Issue 2 2008Andrea Major Sati, the immolation of a Hindu widow on her husband's funeral pyre, is a rare, but highly controversial practice. It has inspired a surfeit of scholarly studies in the last twenty years, most of which concentrate on one of two main historical sati ,episodes': that of early-colonial Bengal, culminating with the British prohibition of 1829, and that of late twentieth-century Rajasthan, epitomised by the immolation of Roop Kanwar in 1987. Comparatively little detailed historical analysis exists on sati cases between these two events, however, a lacuna this paper seeks to address by exploring British and Indian discourses on sati as they existed in late-colonial India. The paper argues that sati remained a site of ideological and actual confrontation in the early twentieth century, with important implications for ongoing debates about Hindu religion, identity and nation. It focuses on the intersection between various colonial debates and contemporaneous Indian social and political concerns during the controversy surrounding the immolation of Sampati Kuer in Barh, Bihar, in 1927, emphasising resonances with postcolonial interpretations of sati and the dissonance of early nineteenth-century tropes when reproduced in the Patna High Court in 1928. Thus, while Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid have suggested that ,ad hoc' attempts to piece together a ,modern' narrative of widow immolation began in the 1950s, this paper will suggest that various contemporary discursive formations on sati can be observed in late-colonial India, when discussions of sati became entwined with Indian nationalism and Hindu identity politics and evoked the first organised female response to sati from an emergent women's movement that saw it as an ideological, as well as physical, violation of women. [source] Suffering and Domesticity: The Subversion of Sentimentalism in Three Stories by Marie Von Ebner-EschenbachGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 1 2006Charlotte Woodford The fiction of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830,1916) is set firmly in the material reality of the Habsburg Empire. Although realist in its commitment to reflecting contemporary society and its values, it has often been ,accused' of sentimentalism. This article argues that while Ebner's short stories indeed adopt some sentimental tropes, this should not be regarded as detracting from the complexity of her work. Rather, it is complex and worthy of examination in its own right. A closer and more differentiated analysis of sentimentalism in Ebner's fiction than is usually undertaken by modern criticism demonstrates that Ebner self-consciously uses sentimental strategies, such as religious imagery, the idealisation of characters or the death of a protagonist, in order to subvert the ethos of the conventional sentimental novel. This tended to reinforce women's domestic role and strengthen the reader's belief in the spiritual value of suffering. The stories ,Das tägliche Leben', ,Die Resel', and ,Der Erstgeborene' show how Ebner, by contrast, undermines the idea that suffering has any value in a religious sense, and takes issue with the idea that women should obediently submit to domestic unhappiness. [source] August 1961: Christa Wolf and the Politics of DisavowalGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 1 2002Charity Scribner Throughout her career Christa Wolf has circumvented any explicit reference to the Berlin Wall. Although Der geteilte Himmel reaches its climax in the summer of 1961, the Wall does not figure in this novel. None the less it provides a framework for the narrative through its absence. Wolf's latest novel, Medea, also organises itself around the tropes of walls and borders. Today, forty years after Berlin's division, one could easily dismiss Wolf's writing because of her ,blind spot'vis-á-vis the Wall. But to do so would forfeit Wolf's subtle handling of literary representation, prohibition, and disavowal. This essay argues that Wolf's elaborations of disavowal play a critical (but as yet unexamined) role in the continuing debate over the politics of memory that has come to define German studies. Freudian theories of repression and fetishism are engaged to discern the structures of disavowal that give form not only to Der geteilte Himmel and Medea, but also to Wolf's most important writings on ethics, ,Selbstanzeige' and ,Nagelprobe'. The essay concludes that authentic memory does not reconstitute a homogeneous image of the past. Rather, as Wolf demonstrates, it reawakens the antagonisms that forever thwart the resolution of and in any narrative. [source] The Cage of Nature: Modernity's History in JapanHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 1 2001Julia Adeney Thomas "The Cage of Nature" focuses on the concept of nature as a way to rethink Japanese and European versions of modernity and the historical tropes that distance "East" from "West." This essay begins by comparing Japanese political philosopher Maruyama Masao and his contemporaries, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Both sets of authors define modernity as the moment when humanity overcomes nature, but Maruyama longs for this triumph while Horkheimer and Adorno deplore its consequences. Maruyama insists that Japan has failed to attain the freedom promised by modernity because it remains in the thrall of nature defined in three ways: as Japan's deformed past, as the mark of Japan's tragic difference from "the West,"and as Japan's accursed sensuality, shackling it to uncritical bodily pleasures. In short, Maruyama sees Japan as trapped in the cage of nature. My argument is that Maruyama's frustration arises from the trap set by modern historiography, which simultaneously traces the trajectory of modernity from servile Nature to freedom of Spirit and at the same time bases the identity of the non-Western world on its closeness to nature. In other words, nature represents both the past and the East, an impossible dilemma for an Asian nationalist desirous of liberty. By revising our historical narratives to take into account the ways in which Western modernity continued to engage versions of nature, it becomes possible to reposition Japan and "the East" within modernity's history rather than treating them as the Other. [source] Book-History Approaches to India: Representations of the Subcontinent in the Novel and Verse, 1780,1823HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2010Ashok Malhotra Literary representations of India in verse and novels written by British authors during the period 1780,1823 have been approached by contemporary scholars either from the postcolonial perspective of relating the fiction to the shifting relationship between colonizer or colonized, or to correlating portrayals to elitist political debates taking place within the metropole. The argument proposes that forthcoming scholarship should adopt a book-history approach to the topic which would add an important contextual dimension to the readings of fictional texts and understanding of a whole set of British cultural attitudes towards Indians. To this end, it proposes that further critical analysis of British India fictions could situate recurring tropes about India in relation to the demands and prevailing fashions of the literary marketplace, and determine how the varying perceived cultural status and the internal development of the two literary modes affect portrayals of the subcontinent. [source] Biopolitical Management, Economic Calculation and "Trafficked Women"INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 4 2010Jacqueline Berman PhD Narratives surrounding human trafficking, especially trafficking in women for sex work, employ gendered and racialized tropes that have among their effects, a shrouding of women's economic decision-making and state collusion in benefiting from their labour. This paper explores the operation of these narratives in order to understand the ways in which they mask the economics of trafficking by sensationalizing the sexual and criminal aspects of it, which in turn allows the state to pursue political projects under the guise of a benevolent concern for trafficked women and/or protection of its own citizens. This paper will explore one national example: Article 18 of Italian Law 40 (1998). I argue that its passage has led to an increase in cooperation with criminal prosecution of traffickers largely because it approaches trafficked women as capable of making decisions about how and what they themselves want to do. This paper will also consider a more global approach to trafficking embedded in the concept of "migration management", an International Organization for Migration (IOM) framework that is now shaping EU, US and other national immigration laws and policies that impact trafficking. It will also examine the inherent limitations of both the national and global approach as an occasion to unpack how Article 18 and Migration Management function as forms of biopolitical management that participate in the production of "trafficking victims" into a massified population to be managed, rather than engender a more engaged discussion of what constitutes trafficking and how to redress it. [source] Battle in the Boardroom: A Discursive PerspectiveJOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES, Issue 1 2002Wilson Ng This article examines the centrality of discourse in achieving managerially relevant outcomes, with a focus on the in-situ performance context of corporate storytellers. The Ric,urian concept of speech act, capturing both the intentionality of organizational discourse and the social context of its production and reception, implicitly guided our research effort. The article has at its core a story of how senior organizational officers exploited the volatile circumstances of a public takeover in Singapore. By looking at the social construction of narratives in their many fragments we come to see how a key protagonist carves out a powerful position. The efficacy of his performances can be seen to be dependent upon the effective use of poetic tropes and the receptiveness of listeners to particular Chinese archetypal relationship-driven themes. In crafting our story we use multiple texts which were produced in and around two case organizations. As such we offer a carefully constructed collage, a mixture of production and reproduction, sticking closely to forms of communication that key organizational actors used to plan, enact and interpret their actions and those of others. Whilst our story offers insights to readers with an interest in organizational discourse, corporate governance and Asian management practices, we refrain from imposing an authoritarian interpretation that insists on identifying with the intentions of the authors. [source] Diet Studies in the Romantic PeriodLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2009Samantha Webb The burgeoning interdisciplinary field of diet studies examines representations of food, eating and drinking, and other aspects of consumption in literary and non-literary texts. It emerged in the field of British Romanticism, at the intersection of materialist and formalist criticisms, and draws on food anthropology, food history and consumption studies. It also seeks to intervene into philosophy and aesthetics by revealing the corporeal and gustatory tropes that sometimes ground these fields. The Romantic period has proven to be a fertile literary moment for questions about diet. Coinciding historically with the consumer revolution, the period between the 1780s and 1830s saw many changes in diet, including the rise of haute cuisine, and the introduction of luxury foods like tea, sugar, coffee and chocolate. Dietary reformers also sought to introduce potatoes into the diets of the poor in the wake of food shortages. In tandem with this historical context, the 18th century is also known as the ,century of taste', and diet studies examine the gustatory dimensions of the aesthetic concept of taste. In diet studies, food is read as a sign that can demystify ,Romantic ideology' but that can also maintain its status as a figure. In this article, I review some of the most important works in the field, and suggest some of the reasons that diet studies has proved to be such a productive intervention into Romantics studies. [source] Sentimental Visions of Empire in Eighteenth-Century StudiesLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2009Lynn Festa This survey of recent critical work on the role played by the sentimental in eighteenth-century representations of empire is organized around four central issues. The first addresses the double-edged use of sentimental writing as a form of ideological mystification , the palliating representation of scenes of colonial violence and imperial exploitation as moments of benevolence or sentimental exchange , and as a form of critique , as a means of representing the causes and consequences of remote actions as an incitement to proper action. The second takes up the way sentimentality is entwined with questions of commerce as a means of thinking about relations across the vast distances of empire, focusing in particular on the way sentimental tropes enabled thinking about the emergence of the global. The third turns to the utility of sentimental language for forging bonds of sympathetic identification with broader communities of nation and of empire, with particular attention to the way the extension of sympathy to another imperils the sanctity of the feeling self, while the final section addresses the way sentimental tropes police the circulation of sympathetic feeling as the means of monitoring the very boundaries of the human in the context of eighteenth-century empire. Throughout I stress the need for more comparative work on the role played by the sentimental not only within different domains of imperial activity but also across periods, disciplines, and national discourses. The essay includes an extensive bibliography of recent studies of eighteenth-century sentimentality in relation to empire. [source] Of Clues and Signs: The Dead Body and Its Evidential TracesAMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2009Zoe¨ Crossland ABSTRACT Taking the conflict over the remains of Ned Kelly as a starting point, in this article I trace the various conceptions of the, body as evidence within the intertwined histories of anthropology, criminology, and medicine to explore how anthropological practice brings the dead into being through exhumation and analysis. I outline the popular rhetorical tropes within which evidentiary claims are situated, exploring how the agency of people after death is understood within the framework of present-day forensic anthropological practice and how this is underwritten by a particular heritage of anatomical analysis. [Keywords: archaeology, forensic anthropology, materiality, semiotics of the body] [source] Americanism, Popular Culture and the Primitive: Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Madame D'Ora (1904)ORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 2 2005Michael Cowan Johannes V. Jensen's novels Madame D'Ora (1904) and Hjulet (The Wheel, 1905) represented some of the most popular works of early twentieth-century Americanist fiction in Europe. Taking Jensen's first novel, Madame D'Ora, as my focus, I show how his work participated in an ambivalent construction of America as an imaginary space of both danger and cultural renewal, one that combined the modern (technology) with a dangerous, ,atavistic' influence. Through an investigation of Jensen's use of tropes of primitivity, in particular, I argue that such literary Americanism in fact represented an effort to work through changes taking place within Europe itself. Specifically, Madame D'Ora deals with the rise of new forms of mass culture and popular entertainment , such as the cinema , and their effect on traditional European intellectuals. Within this context, Jensen represents the new ,American' forms of technology and popular culture both as a hope for overcoming European decadence and as a dangerous form of cultural and psychic primitivization. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||