The Room and the Street: Gwen John’s and Jean Rhys’s Insider/Outsider Modernism

The modernist city is commonly thought of as a city of exteriors; we envision the ‘spaces of modernity’ as sites of industry or leisure, and apply the very notion of the ‘urban’—urban planning, urban studies—to the way we approach public spaces. But by reading together the paintings of Gwen John (1876–1939) and the writings of Jean Rhys (1890–1979), we discern a different modernist story than we are used to hearing—one that collapses divisions between the room and the street, the private and the public. By focusing on tropes of rooms in their works, the author seeks to nuance our understanding of John’s and Rhys’s relationship to community from within the supposed safety or isolation of their interior rooms, and argues more broadly for a women’s modernism of the city that collapses divisions between the room and the street, the private and the public. These two figures, who are usually read as ‘outsiders’ to mainstream modernist culture, produce a distinct ‘insider/outsider’ aesthetic which reveals them to be working not outside, but at the very heart of modernist experimentation.     

The Impersonal Strategy: Re-visiting Virginia Woolf's Position in The Common Reader Essays

The concept of impersonality as a writer's strategy has been exposed to misinterpretations that either fail to exhaust its full meaning and deposit an unequal amount of attention on all components of the term or, in the worst case, tend to distort its true elements. In relation to Virginia Woolf's criticism, in particular, it is a critical commonplace that the author employed an impersonal position in order not to fully materialise her feminist vision, but to shy away from explicitly expressing her feminist convictions and openly supporting women's rights. Indicative of this is the criticism that suggests disapproval of Woolf's reluctance to side with her own gender and declare the power of female personality.

The aim here is to challenge such critical views, separate the discussion of impersonality from its association with that of androgyny, and re-visit the issue of Woolf's employment of the impersonal strategy. I examine two of Woolf's essays on nineteenth-century women writers included in her first volume of The Common Reader and offer an analysis from both a gender-oriented and a genderless angle. Woolf's strong affinity with female conditions of oppression, her modernist convictions, her need to compromise with the male-dominated context of the time and her concurrent urge to co-operate with the common reader of an unspecified sex for the sake of artistic creation reveal more complex reasons behind her intentions than those examined by critics so far.     

马克思的法律社会理论及其当代启示——以《〈黑格尔法哲学批判〉导言》为分析对象

法律社会理论是在法律社会学所提供的经验素材的基础上对整个现代社会的法律机理和法制系统进行总体性分析与批判,对现代法律关系下的人与物的关系、人与人的关系以及社会总体关系进行一种前瞻式的研究。马克思的法律社会理论深入到社会结构及其关系的内部,对人是人的最高本质这一核心命题进行了深刻解析,是一种关于法律的社会批判理论,并从批判中得出了法律之抽象性、矛盾性和世俗性等现代性问题。     

法学研究范式变革之我见

从环境法能否调整人与自然的关系这一命题出发 ,通过借鉴后现代主义思潮 ,以一个全新的视角 ,阐述了法学研究范式变革的必然性及其重大意义。     

斯蒂芬·克莱恩的现代主义倾向

斯蒂芬·克莱恩的小说表现出了明显的现代主义倾向。他通过表现人物的命运由环境或本能决定的主题否定了上帝的万能性。在表现空间上,他将叙述转移到人物的内心世界。尽管他用了介入式的叙述,但其基本叙述视角是人物的意识,作出了作家从作品“隐退”的努力。他采用视角转换的方法,使全知叙述人只充当与其他视角的视差形成对照的视角之一。他的作品中还有意识流的萌芽和将人物心态移情于物以表现物的人化、人的异化等现代主义的手法。他的作品以心理情节为主,表现出了人物的孤独和唯我等现代思想。     

马克思法律思想中的现代性逻辑——基于现代性理论及后现代变体的考察

马克思法律思想中的现代性逻辑是在"现实—人—自由"的关系性概念中检视其法律与社会理论的各种"建构性"预设的可能性。就其本质而言,马克思法律思想中的现代性逻辑是联结西方现代性问题与后现代思潮的一个至关重要的"中介",它为理解马克思法律与社会思想的论述提供了整体性的历史与逻辑相统一视野,为修补马克思自身的"断裂"提供了可以理解的路径。     

Defining the nation in Russia’s buffer zone: the politics of citizenship by birth on territory (jus soli) in Moldova,Azerbaijan, and Georgia

Citizenship by birth on territory (jus soli), versus by blood (jus sanguinis), is associated with liberal democracies and the Americas. Yet Azerbaijan and Moldova, part of the “buffer zone” between Russia and the West, have used unconditional jus soli. No such law exists in Europe or elsewhere in the post-Soviet space, including in Georgia, a third country that is part of this “buffer zone.” The three countries cannot forge closer links to the West due to Russia’s support of “frozen” separatist conflicts on their territories. The article finds that territorial citizenship in Azerbaijan and Moldova, as well as its absence in Georgia, are linked to territorial integrity concerns, a multi-century historical context that had thwarted or facilitated ethnic collective identity, and geopolitical fears of dual citizenship. Both authoritarian (Azerbaijan) and liberal-democratic (Moldova) states have used the resulting territorial concept of national identity to combat ethnic separatism, whereas Georgia remains an ethnocracy with difficulties integrating ethnic minorities.     

Jean Rhys,William Orpen and the Frames of Modernist Representation

The female body as artist’s model and its exchange value—both the woman and her painted image—are deployed by Caribbean modernist Jean Rhys to question representational structures as they exist in the modernist art context. This article considers the relation between literary modernism and the visual arts, between text and image, in her unpublished novel Triple Sec and short story ‘Tea With an Artist’. Using the fleeting relationship between Rhys and English painter Sir William Orpen, for whom she posed nude aged twenty-three, as my basis, I examine Rhys’s presentation of the power politics that constrain the female model in the contemporary art world. Her allusions to artists, models and artworks in her texts widen out to issues of frames and framing, where narratives of framed pictures, or the female model’s body within a picture’s frame, speak of social acts of framing, containment and objectification within modernist representational structures.