Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev and the idea of Muslim Marxism: empire,Third World(s) and praxis

Abstract

This paper revisits the idea of Muslim Marxism, as espoused through the life and work of the Tatar Muslim and Bolshevik intellectual and revolutionary Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev (1892–1940). I argue that Sultan-Galiev’s oeuvre – a unique synthesis of Marxist, Muslim modernist, anti-colonial and Third World praxis – represents a path-breaking take on Muslim selfhood and practices of belonging.     

从同一美学看当代文坛警察形象

中国当代文坛塑造了众多公安人员形象,流露出比较明显的同一美学特征。上世纪九十年代以来,具有同一美学形态的文学创作受到质疑,警察形象塑造呈现多元化态势;同时在大众审美品位的左右下同一美学色彩又得以强化,表现出类型化、通俗化的倾向。警察形象的成功塑造有待于对同一美学作扬弃,克服消费时代文学文本常有的浅表化和雷同化倾向,以求新的突破。     

Rabindranath Tagore and the Aesthetics of Postmodernism

Skeptical postmodern claims about the viability of authorship and meaning in literature are contrasted in historical persepective with Rabindranath Tagore's views on the power of literary art to illuminate reality and enrich feeling. Consequences of postmodern methods and theories are explored with reference to his defense of art and life as a unity that entails unique knowledge and insight. Although influenced by Western culture, he distrusted theory applied to art. For him, durable meanings are an imperative of life for which literature is a vehicle. A post-Nobel Prize attempt to promote Eastern wisdom as a corrective to Western rationalism and materialism did not succeed.     

转型：从写实传统到现代主义——论1960至70年代台湾话剧的发展

台湾话剧从写实传统向现代主义转型是在1960年代后半期及70年代.姚一苇等戏剧家为了真实深刻地描写现实和表现人,为了给已呈衰颓迹象的台湾话剧注入活力,借鉴西方现代派戏剧并融合民族戏曲传统去求新求变,推动了中国话剧艺术的发展.     

Sacred Belonging: Writing,Religion and Community in H.D.'s Second World War Novels

Abstract: This article considers two works from H.D.'s Second World War writing: The Gift and The Sword Went Out to Sea. In these texts, H.D. situates herself in the context of diverse intimate communities: her spiritualist circle, her partnership with Bryher, her family and previous generations of Moravians. These communities ground her personal vision of writing as a spiritual exercise that will bring healing to both the individual psyche and the wider society ravaged by war. The significance of community is such that when she becomes isolated, desolation and breakdown follow. The restoration of communication and community through vision and writing leads to healing and a particular understanding of religious modernism as a unity of spiritual and material, transcendent and ordinary.     

后现代主义与当代设计文化观念

设计文化是人们提高自身生活品质、改善生存环境的重要手段。对当代艺术设计的文化观念、审美倾向的精神状态影响最大的,应首推后现代主义设计观念的革命性主张及其设计语言的多元化逻辑。它更强调生存状态的自我保留和风格特点的个性化,力主人文情感的主体性,注重文化的共生观念,强调形态的重构与创新,对当代中国艺术设计的文化观念、审美倾向具有广泛社会影响和深刻的历史作用。     

Trouble with Ken: new labour's negative campaign in the selection and election process for London mayor

This paper examines the London mayoral selection and election process and discusses New Labour's negative campaign against the candidacy of Ken Livingstone. It discusses the objectives which lay behind the adoption of this new constitutional system of a directly elected mayor and traces New Labour's problems in getting their chosen candidate elected. It traces the Blair leadership's difficulties in choosing a viable candidate, the methods employed to manipulate the selection process and the stunts and dirty tricks used to undermine Living‐ stone's mayoral challenge. It places these problems in the context of media coverage of such a negative and divisive campaign. The paper concludes by outlining some wider implications for New Labour's future campaigning and suggests that voters now have a more tarnished image of New Labour as a result of this campaign. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Kawabata and cinema: the ambivalence of knowledge,medium, and influence

Abstract

Many researchers have considered the involvement of Kawabata Yasunari in cinema and the medium's possible influence on his literature. Such approaches, however, tend to assume a definition of the motion pictures as visuality or montage that then influences Kawabata instead of first considering Kawabata's own conception of cinema, his own film theory. By analyzing his writings on film, including his film criticism, short stories involving cinema, and his involvement in the film A Page of Madness, this paper outlines Kawabata's conception of cinema and argues that he developed a portrait of cinema that posed it as a challenge to identity, perception and knowledge itself. Often associated with the female body, the movies became to Kawabata both an object of fascination and a threat, something ultimately to be controlled through literature and the literary subject. What influenced his literature was then perhaps this perception of cinema as posing an epistemic crisis. It is his ambivalence towards this challenge that can serve as a key for elaborating on Kawabata's complicated location within prewar modernism.     

Maurice Blanchot: Modernism,Dissidence and the Privilege of Writing

The article links Blanchot’s philosophical and political ideas. Embarking from his recurrent dialogue with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, it traces the development of Blanchot’s “dissident” version of modernism and his notion of “writing”, alongside his post-war political involvement and writing. I argue that Blanchot never relinquished the purist modernist idea of the privilege of writing and with it the privilege of his own self-identification primarily as a writer. It is my contention that this emphasis sometimes obfuscated his vision, both conceptually and politically. I exemplify my claim by appealing to Blanchot’s unconditional support of Israel and Zionism.     

Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife: A Reassessment

Abstract

The Pastor’s Wife (1914) may seem at first reading simply another depiction of a woman struggling for liberation in the decades following the work of Thomas Hardy and Henrik Ibsen, being the story of how Ingeborg Bullivant escapes from an English patriarchal home, only to find herself trapped in another one in Germany. The novel, however, marks a turning point in Elizabeth von Arnim’s career; it is a novel that looks back to previous themes while anticipating those to come. It demonstrates, with comedy and bitterness, themes of alienation and exile; satirizes German codes and class; and provides a lyrical Romantic vision of the natural world. It also presents the married woman as a prisoner in a way that anticipates Vera (1921). The novel can also stand alone as an underrated classic that plays an important part in the history of English literature. Published at the beginning of high modernism, it shows, unlike the work of some canonized writers of the time, a fusion of realism and modernism. This essay argues that the novel is a proto-feminist work that is radical in its portrayal of women’s experience and influenced by literary naturalism in its childbirth scenes, but pessimistic about possibilities for change. The essay shows how the novel is modernist in its depiction of the alienated experience of the city; uses nineteenth-century realism in its narrative structure and comedy; and yet is forward-looking in its use of endings. A book that begins as a comedy but ends as a tragedy, The Pastor’s Wife deserves equal recognition with the work of H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster, writers with whom von Arnim was connected and by whom she was influenced.