24318 results in Edinburgh University Press
4 - Sovereignty, Legitimacy and the Voice of ‘The People’
- Spyros A. Sofos, London School of Economics and Political Science
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- Turkish Politics and 'The People'
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 11 June 2023
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- 30 September 2022, pp 122-157
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‘The People’ as an Empty Signifier
As the Ottoman Empire was about to capitulate at the end of the First World War, the forces that would eventually form the National Movement represented themselves as campaigning against and making up for the Empire’s legitimacy deficit. Having their intellectual and many of their activist roots in the Young Turk movement, they were motivated by the same drive to ‘empower’ the Turkish national community in an empire that had granted constitutional equality to other ethnic groups and enabled them to pursue their own national goals at the expense of the Turkish nation. In this context, the National Movement, just like its contemporary movements, did indeed challenge the traditional foundations of authority that underpinned the ancient regime, and invested itself with the aura of popular consent (see Jenkins and Sofos 1996:10–11).
What can be said about the National Movement in particular, and Turkish nationalism at the end of the First World War in general, was that its ideology and politics were characterised by fluidity and ambiguity. As I argued in Chapter 3, leaving aside the underlying, yet widely shared, foundational belief that the Christian population of the territories that were included in the National Pact (Misak-ı Millî) and, eventually the territories that were ceded to the Turkish state in the treaties of Lausanne and Kars, were at best ‘minorities’ and, at worst, unworthy of citizenship, the political project of privileging Turkishness and subsuming in it all other alternative and potentially competing identities coexisted with a more open conception of the nation that acknowledged, and on occasion formally recognised. diversity among the Muslim peoples of the emergent Republic, their cultures and the ways they were organised. The various disagreements in the National Assembly over the nomenclature that would apply to ‘the people’ of the Republic were indicative of both the nationalist project’s not yet closed character and also the precariousness of its legitimacy, and where that rested.
These ambiguities notwithstanding, the National Movement claimed to be expressing the will of ‘the people’ of the defeated Ottoman Empire, and eventually of the territories of Anatolia and Thrace, that would become republican Turkey. Long before Mustafa Kemal described the Turkish state as ‘populist’ in 1931, in an effort to afford it legitimacy, the National Movement was claiming to be acting in the name of ‘the people’.
28 - War: Modernism in Camouflage, Strategic Fantasy and the Technological Sublime
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- By Patrick Deer
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
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- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
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- 30 September 2022, pp 432-446
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War forced modernism’s uneasy romance with technology into crisis. Now rivals, now critics, now technophiles and technophobes, modernists confronted and embraced from the start the expansionist energies of technology. War would bring an aesthetic, political and ethical reckoning that disturbed and fractured this intimate relationship between modernism and technology. For their part, the more avant-garde writers and artists actively engaged and exacerbated the contradictions in technology revealed by the First World War. The technologies of war, like artillery, the machine gun, high explosive shells, poison gas, aeroplanes, camouflaged Dazzle Ships and the tank, seemed to be the violent double of modernist and avant-garde artistic experimentation. Like T. S. Eliot’s ‘mon semblable, mon frère’ in The Waste Land (1922), these technologies brought ‘the shock of the new’ to battlefields from late nineteenth-century ‘Little Colonial Wars’ to the First World War and beyond. Famously celebrated and aestheticised in Filippo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifestos, they seemed to offer objective correlatives or even causal mechanisms for avant-garde shock tactics.
Yet the technologies that modernised warfare from 1914 to 1945 shattered the utopian, imperious promise of modern industrial power and communications, revealing and demystifying a dystopian drive towards colonialism and war. This reinforced a modernist sense of irony and epistemological scepticism, which Paul Fussell famously argued in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) marked a descent into a generalised sense of ironic disillusionment after 1914. More disturbing than the epochal violence unleashed by military technology was the revelation for many writers and artists that modern warfare not only impoverished experience, as Walter Benjamin noted in ‘The Story Teller’, but revealed a more profound transformation of human experience and social relations. Observing famously that ‘men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience’, Benjamin argued that this tendency was part of a larger logic of modernisation: ‘For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power’ (Benjamin 1969a: 84).
I will argue here that literary modernism offered a powerful lens through which to understand the relationship between technology and modern war not only because of its obsessive ambivalence towards these relations, but because of the intimate relationship between aesthetic experimentation and experimental technologies of violence. War exposed modernism’s internal contradictions.
24 - Vexatious Litigant Orders
- Edited by Iain W. Nicol, Thorntons, James S. Flett
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- 07 June 2023
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- 30 September 2022, pp 154-155
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In terms of s. 101(1) of the Courts Reform (Scotland) Act 2014, the Inner House of the Court of Session may make a vexatious litigant order if satisfied that a person has habitually and persistently, without any reasonable ground for doing so: (a) instituted vexatious civil proceedings; or (b) made vexatious applications to the court in the course of civil proceedings (whether or not instituted by the person).
There clearly has to be a pattern of conduct in raising or conducting litigation in a vexatious manner.
The critical question is whether the conduct in question can be classified as ‘vexatious’. Delivering the opinion of the court in the petition by the Lord Advocate for a vexatious litigant order against Aslam the Lord Justice Clerk stated:
‘ … it is not enough for an individual to be classed as a vexatious litigant that actions which he has instituted, or applications made, have not succeeded or been abandoned: it is not persistent failure which is the key, rather that the failure in question has been based on there being no merit even to commence the litigation or make the application. The critical finding will be that repeated litigations and applications have failed for reasons of competence, irrelevance and the like. It is the fact that repeated actions were commenced with there being no reasonable grounds for doing so which can render them vexatious’.
The court adopts a two stage test in determining whether to grant such an order. First, it requires to be satisfied that the s. 101(1) test has been met. Secondly, it requires to be satisfied that it is in the interests of justice to grant the order.
Such an order interferes with the rights of a citizen to access the courts. However, the interference is limited and designed to prevent abuses of court processes. The order does not prevent a person from raising court actions, simply that they have to satisfy an Outer House judge that there is a reasonable basis for raising the proceedings.
17 - Group Proceedings
- Edited by Iain W. Nicol, Thorntons, James S. Flett
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- Expenses
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- 07 June 2023
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- 30 September 2022, pp 107-110
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Historically, it was not possible to raise group proceedings or class actions in Scotland. The introduction of the Civil Litigation (Expenses and Group Proceedings) (Scotland) Act 2018 changed the landscape in that regard and introduced group proceedings to Scottish litigation, at least in the Court of Session.
Previously, the norm in such cases was for one action, or a select few actions, to be proceeded with. The remaining actions relating to the group, whilst still having to be raised if there were time bar considerations, would be sisted pending the outcome of the lead action(s). Such procedure did not fit well with the recovery of expenses. Whilst possible to identify which court procedure related to which particular action, a difficulty arose insofar as how the work generic to all actions, including those sisted pending the outcome of the lead action(s), should be dealt with. Generally, an account of expenses in each of the sisted actions would be prepared on a block fee basis given the limited court procedure as this would prove more remunerative insofar as the sisted actions were concerned. Strictly speaking, each sisted action’s share of the generic work undertaken for all actions would be subsumed within the block fees charged in each account of expenses. A difficulty arose in that the generic work undertaken in relation to all actions within the group could only be properly quantified by preparation of a detailed account of expenses, therefore falling foul of the rules of court dictating that a solicitor cannot charge his account partly on a detailed basis and partly on a block fee basis.
In one instance, a case proceeded as the lead case with all remaining actions relating to the same subject matter being sisted pending the outcome of the lead case. Generic settlement discussions ensued, resulting in settlement of the lead case and also the various sisted actions. As the settlement discussions took place solely within the lead action, all work, including counsel’s charges were included in the judicial account of expenses for the lead action. Upon taxation of the account of expenses the auditor of the Court of Session determined that the generic settlement discussions required to be apportioned between all cases.
1 - Electricity: Technologies and Aesthetics
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- By Laura Ludtke
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 07 June 2023
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- 30 September 2022, pp 23-35
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Summary
In the first movement of Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s 1928 gender- and genrebending novel set in Elizabethan England, night is marked by an absence of light. For Woolf, darkness was the predominant experience of night in the seventeenth century; instances of nocturnal illumination only demonstrate the inherent fallibility of light. The introduction of the electric light does not occur in the novel at the time of its advent in the late 1870s, but in 1928, the moment in which the novel’s final movement is set. Woolf employs electric lights to signal the close of a very long nineteenth century and herald the belated beginning of the twentieth century. Orlando is astonished by the convenience of the instantaneous illumination of ‘a whole room’, of ‘hundreds of rooms’ at ‘a touch’. Not only was ‘the sky […] bright all night long’ but so too were ‘the pavements’ (Woolf 2008: 283). This proliferation of artificial illumination across the city distinguishes ‘the present moment’ from that preceding it. Orlando’s new world appears more vibrant and vital; ‘[t]here was something definite and distinct about the age’, something modern (Woolf 2008: 284). Following Woolf’s example, we take for granted that the electric light was an accepted object and, indeed, symbol of modernity. But was this still the case, fifty years after the first commercially viable electric lights were introduced in London’s streets?
As one of electricity’s most prominent and prevalent technologies, the electric light is entangled with an elision of technology and modernity and of modernity with modernisation. But electricity, electric lights and modernity are not interchangeable. Graeme Gooday challenges the presumption that ‘electrification and modernization are integral features of the same phenomenon, and thus that electricity is synonymous with modernity’ (Gooday 2008: 14–15). The orthogonal processes of domestication and modernisation were neither assured nor easily accomplished; before the electric light could become an object of modernity and, in turn, a modernist object, it needed first to be romanticised ‘as both an upper-class luxury and a mysterious magical force’ and anthropomorphised ‘as benign fairy, goddess, wizard or imp’ (Gooday 2008: 19).
7 - Sanction for Counsel in the Sheriff Court
- Edited by Iain W. Nicol, Thorntons, James S. Flett
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- 30 September 2022, pp 58-67
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Summary
There is no automatic right of recovery for a successful party in relation to the costs of employing counsel in sheriff court or Sheriff Appeal Court proceedings. Sanction for counsel is not required for Court of Session proceedings.
The starting point for all applications to sanction counsel’s involvement is s. 108 of the Courts Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 (the 2014 Act), whether made before or after 29 April 2019. The Act provides:
(1) This section applies in civil proceedings in the Sheriff Court or the Sheriff Appeal Court where the court is deciding, for the purposes of any relevant expenses rule, whether to sanction the employment of counsel by a party for the purposes of the proceedings.
(2) The court must sanction the employment of counsel if the court considers, in all the circumstances of the case, that it is reasonable to do so.
(3) In considering that matter, the court must have regard to—
(a) whether the proceedings are such as to merit the employment of counsel, having particular regard to—
(i) the difficulty or complexity, or likely difficulty or complexity, of the proceedings,
(ii) the importance or value of any claim in the proceedings, and
(b) the desirability of ensuring that no party gains an unfair advantage by virtue of the employment of counsel.
(4) The court may have regard to such other matters as it considers appropriate.
(5) References in this section to proceedings include references to any part or aspect of the proceedings.
(6) In this section—
• “counsel” means—
a. an advocate,
b. a solicitor having a right of audience in the Court of Session under section 25A of the Solicitors (Scotland) Act 1980,
• “court”, in relation to proceedings in the sheriff court, means the sheriff,
• “relevant expenses rule” means, in relation to any proceedings mentioned in subsection (1), any provision of an act of sederunt requiring, or having the effect of requiring, that the employment of counsel by a party for the purposes of the proceedings be sanctioned by the court before the fees of counsel are allowable as expenses that may be awarded to the party.
(7) This section is subject to an act of sederunt under section 104(1) or 106(1).
Conclusion
- Jeffrey A. Bell, Southeastern Louisiana University
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- Book:
- An Inquiry into Analytic-Continental Metaphysics
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- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2023
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- 30 September 2022, pp 204-206
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Let us return to where we began, with Kant's admission that philosophy ‘cannot, as other sciences, attain universal and lasting acclaim’ (Kant 2014, 5). With this recognition, Kant began a philosophical project that has dominated much of philosophy for the past two centuries – namely, the task of reconciling philosophical inquiry with the success of the sciences. As we traced the implications of these efforts, we honed in on two dominant trends, what I called the monist, Spinozist tendency, and the pluralist, Humean tendency. Both can be seen to be carrying forward important aspects of Kant's project. The Spinozist tendency, as we saw, recognises that there is a reality that accounts for but is not to be confused with anything determinate, such as natural laws, universals or Ideas. The problem this leaves us with is the problem of accounting for how the determinate comes to be conditioned by that which is not to be confused with it. The Humean tendency, by contrast, accepts the reality of diverse phenomena, a reality that is fundamentally determinate and discrete, whether these be Hume's impressions, Russell's particulars or Lewis’s singletons, among other examples we have discussed. The problem this leaves us with is accounting for the relationship between determinate phenomena, an account that Bradley argues ultimately leads us to a vicious regress which undermines the possibility of giving an account. The problems both tendencies lead to are exacerbated, I argued, by assuming that in the end an account must rely on something that is fundamentally determinate. It is this bias in favour of the primacy of the determinate that was challenged as I developed the arguments in favour of problematic Ideas.
Problematic Ideas entail the paradoxical tendency to be both dedifferentiating, and hence less and less differentiated to the point of becoming irreducible to anything determinate, and differentiating, or more and more differentiated as relationships become increasingly individuated. The primacy of the determinate largely adopts the latter approach, seeking to determine what is the case, locating the determinate reality that offers us an account and/or ends a regress.
Appendix 2 - Success Fee Agreement and Cooling Off Notice Templates
- Edited by Iain W. Nicol, Thorntons, James S. Flett
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- 30 September 2022, pp 351-358
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Success Fee Agreement and Cooling Off Notice Templates
SUCCESS FEE AGREEMENT
NOTICE OF THE RIGHT TO CANCEL
IN TERMS OF THE CONSUMER CONTRACTS (INFORMATION, CANCELLATION AND ADDITIONAL CHARGES) REGULATIONS 2013
Name : [insert client details]
Address : [insert client postal address]
Date : [insert date of signature]
Right to cancel (“cooling off period”)
You have the right to cancel this contract within 14 days without giving any reason. This notice was posted to you on [ ] and the cancellation period you are entitled to will expire at midnight on [ insert date 14 days after deemed service ].
To exercise the right to cancel this contract, you must inform us :-
[insert name and postal address for service of notice]
Email : [insert email address for sending notice ]
of your decision to cancel this contract by a clear statement (e.g. a letter sent by tracked post or email). You may use the attached model cancellation form if that is helpful but it is not obligatory.
To meet the cancellation deadline, it is sufficient for you to send your communication concerning your exercise of the right to cancel before the cancellation period has expired. Proof of posting should be obtained by you and produced on request. An email will date itself.
Effect of agreement
By signing a Success Fee Agreement you are agreeing to a success fee being deducted from any compensation which you are awarded. It is open to you to seek independent advice from a personal injury solicitor (at your own expense) as to the terms of the Agreement. The Law Society of Scotland have a list of specialist personal injury solicitors.
Effect of cancellation
If you requested us to begin the performance of services during the cancellation period, you shall pay us an amount which is in proportion to what has been performed until you have communicated to us your cancellation from this contract, in comparison with the full coverage of the contract.
CANCELLATION FORM
To : [insert name and address for service of cancellation notice]
Email : [insert email address for sending notice]
I/We [*] hereby give notice that I/We [*] cancel my/our [*] contract for the supply of the following service [ (insert details) ] received on [ insert dates) ].
Conclusion
- Paul Williams, University of Exeter
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- The US Graphic Novel
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 06 June 2023
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- 30 September 2022, pp 236-237
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The US Graphic Novel has shown that complete long comics narratives in book form aimed at adult readers have been published in the United States for over 100 years. One could enter a bookshop in 1930 – or 1960 – or 1990 and pick up a text that would now be recognised as a graphic novel, even if the label was only coined in 1964. The comics fans who debated the concept in the mid-1960s held to three ingredients as defining features of the graphic novel: length, book publication, and adult readers. We have seen, though, how ragged around the edges those principles seem, especially in the twenty-first century, when two of the most proliferating varieties are e-graphic novels and graphic novels for children and young adults.
Literary publishing currently frames the graphic novelist as an autonomous artist, a notion powered by the underground comix of the 1960s, which abided by a different commercial logic to mainstream comics. Nonetheless, the majority of graphic novelists remain subject to economic concerns, even if their work is free to access. There has never been a single model for making and selling graphic novels, and because long-form comics have been published by organisations with very different financial imperatives – companies with roots in pulp magazines, charitable institutions, long-established trade presses, creators self-publishing their own comics – it is sometimes difficult to see them as part of the same tradition. By bringing them together, this book has shone a light on their interconnectedness, how ideas, techniques, and personnel have migrated across the different spheres of the US graphic novel and the industries that make them.
The history I have told confirms that the graphic novel has never been a discrete medium. It exists in a symbiotic relationship with periodical comics, film, posters, zines, prints, and the computer screen, as well as the literary forms that the word ‘novel’ suggests, with modes of visual storytelling passing back and forth between different media. These exchanges will endure and mutate, though I’ll hold back any predictions for the future. Who would have guessed that the graphic novel would have the qualified visibility that it currently possesses, even twenty years ago?
Preface
- Edited by Iain W. Nicol, Thorntons, James S. Flett
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- 30 September 2022, pp ix-x
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If you have taken the trolley bus through Stanley Park in Vancouver, you may have noticed a statue that looks pretty much like a mermaid sitting by the waterside. To ensure his small band of tourists did not jump to the wrong conclusions, the friendly trolley driver/tour guide was quick to observe ‘They think it’s a mermaid, but it’s no’ a mermaid’.
Whilst somewhat similar to the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, he explained it was a statue of a girl in a wet suit. The guide kept repeating the fact that it wasn’t what it appeared to be and somehow managed to hold the interest of his patrons, even though, in the overall scheme of things, no one on the trolley could have cared less if it was a mermaid or not.
By the same token, and to avoid any misunderstandings, this is not a textbook. It does not seek to emulate the styles of the weighty tome that is McLaren from 1912 or the more recent offering from Hastings in 1989. Others will doubtless produce more academic and authoritative works. This is simply, and unashamedly, a handbook written by practitioners for practitioners. We would also be delighted if law students could, as part of their studies, be introduced to some of the topics to give them a head start. All too often, our experience is that junior lawyers have little or no understanding of expenses issues and have no idea where to turn to find out the answers.
We want to provide a readily accessible source of information on what is an ever-changing area of civil practice. We felt there was a need for something that could bring together the old and the new, include extracts from legislation, court rules and judgments where it might be useful to see those set out in the body of the book rather than go hunting for them elsewhere. We wanted to create something that is user friendly. We cannot offer all the answers, not least because the jurisprudence in some areas (such as qualified one-way cost shifting) is so new, there is no precedent, in Scotland.
21 - Speculative Fiction
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- By Jovian Parry
- Edited by Laura Wright, Western Carolina University, North Carolina, Emelia Quinn, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 07 June 2023
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- 30 September 2022, pp 287-298
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Introduction
If you are what you eat, it stands to reason that it must be impossible to eat and remain unchanged. Routine exchanges of regulatory signals and genetic material between eater and eaten threaten the skin-encapsulated human self with contamination and corruption by the other from within. However, that same “persistence of others in the flesh” (Landecker, “Exposure” 169) also highlights how any subject, human or otherwise, can only emerge via relationships of corporeal intimacy with other species and other selves. To these ends, Donna Haraway engages the evolutionary theory of symbiogenesis – literally, “becoming by living together” – as an alternative origin story engendering new insights into the origins, dynamism, and diversity of Earthly life. A secular creation myth hinging not on “cooperation” or “competition” but rather “indigestion” (Haraway, “Symbiogenesis”), symbiogenesis unsettles atomistic understandings of the self, instead understanding subjectivity as fundamentally dynamic, entangled, and always-already multiple.
Speculative fiction has a long history of direct engagement with the theory of symbiogenesis (see, for example, Simak). One such work is Octavia E. Butler’s groundbreaking Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–1989), a sf story centrally concerned with the power dynamics of eating. In Xenogenesis, symbiogenesis informs an ethic of non-violence that eschews hierarchy and mandates dietary veganism yet remains embedded in deeply uneven power relations of coercion and instrumentalization. This confluence of utopian impulses and the acknowledgment of the inevitable insufficiency of such impulses is a constitutive feature not only of Butler’s sf, but of veganism itself (Quinn and Westwood 1). Both sf and veganism share a quality of estrangement from social norms (Schuster 219); symbiogenesis has likewise been deployed as a stratagem of imagining otherwise. As such, Xenogenesis thickens and complicates configurations of species and subjectivities, acknowledging selves as protean multispecies assemblages while affirming the differential accountability of such selves to others, human and otherwise.
Symbiogenesis
Symbiosis describes the long-lasting corporeal intimacy – obligate or optional, parasitic or pathogenic – of differently-named organisms. Symbiotic relationships express their liveliest potentialities in the phenomenon of symbiogenesis, or “long term stable symbiosis that leads to evolutionary change” (Margulis and Sagan, Genomes 12). In symbiogenesis, separate species “form a symbiotic consortium which becomes the target of selection as a single entity” (Mayr xiii), leading to “the appearance of a new phenotype, trait, tissue, organelle, organ, or organism formed through a symbiotic relationship” (Hird 58).
Filmography
- Christer Bakke Andresen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
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- Book:
- Norwegian Nightmares
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- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 03 June 2023
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- 30 September 2022, pp 159-164
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2 - Situating ‘The People’ in the Foundational Narratives of the Early Turkish Republic
- Spyros A. Sofos, London School of Economics and Political Science
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- Turkish Politics and 'The People'
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 11 June 2023
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- 30 September 2022, pp 26-68
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Introduction: Between Empire and Republic
The transition from the Ottoman state to the new Turkish Republic, between roughly the end of 1919 and the formal establishment of the Turkish state on 29 October 1923, was a complex process of trial and error. The nationalist officers and the bureaucratic middle class that led the process, apart from their overarching agreement on the goal of creating a modern nation state that would be free of the inertia and shortcomings of its Ottoman predecessor, were not unanimous in the detail of their vision. Even the fundamental specificities of what the new nation state would look like in its territory, population composition and identity were not clear – the key actors in the search for a post-imperial order had different views on who the people of this new state would be, and what would be the elements that would bring them together and inspire loyalty and a sense of patriotism. Identification, during this time of transition to political modernity in the former Ottoman sphere, was a fluid and quite often complex process, riddled with contradictions that would ultimately be suppressed with the ascendance of nationalism in general in the territories of the Empire, and the establishment of hegemonic nationalisms including Turkish or Arab ones in particular, in due course.
This is, to be fair, not unique to the post-Ottoman space. As Billig suggests in his discussion of the imagination of nationhood (1995:74–7), contradictory themes, definitions and understandings can coexist within the same experiential framework and context of continuous interaction and negotiation that makes possible, sustains and reproduces social action systems. Some of these key actors remained deliberately vague as to these details as they were aware of the enormity of the task of bringing the pieces of the linguistic, ethnic and religious mosaic of the territories of the Empire that they could salvage, and forging out of them a cohesive nation that would not be susceptible to the pull of centrifugal forces that alternative, competing nationalisms represented and, more importantly, that would be willing to fight for their new motherland. This explains the ambiguity, and even diglossia, of the leadership of the nationalist movement at a time when it seemed that the mobilising force of religion, and of identities other than the Turkish, were greater than an appeal to a clearly defined nation.
1 - Introduction to Norwegian Nightmares
- Christer Bakke Andresen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
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- Norwegian Nightmares
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 03 June 2023
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- 30 September 2022, pp 1-17
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On 1 November 2019, the weekend of Halloween, a Norwegian horror movie premiered in cinemas across the country. The title of the movie was Lake of Death (De dødes tjern), and it was loosely based on a 1942 novel by the esteemed Norwegian poet and crime author André Bjerke. At the time of its release, this adaptation by director Nini Bull Robsahm was the latest addition to the popular horror cinema tradition that had flourished in Norway since the turn of the millennium.
The film was also the second adaptation of Bjerke’s novel, the first incarnation being the only full-blooded pre-2000 Norwegian horror film: Kåre Bergstrøm’s Lake of the Dead (De dødes tjern) in 1958. While such a genre movie had been one-of-a-kind in the 1950s, a generic anomaly in a national cinema that rarely indulged popular Hollywood-related genres except for the comedy, the horror film had become so common and proliferating in post-2000 Norwegian cinema that the new adaptation barely registered in the national press. A lot had changed in the film and media landscape of Norway in the preceding twenty years, and the coming and consolidation of a national horror cinema was one of the results.
Robsahm’s Lake of Death tells the story of a group of young people who venture into the wilderness of Norway to spend time together in a remote house in the woods. Here they will ostensibly help the film’s central character Lillian (Iben Akerlie) overcome the lingering trauma of losing her twin brother. As is common for many types of horror tales, things are not quite as they seem: the lost brother returns, and the deep secrets of his disappearance and subsequent reappearance force their way back to the surface. The return of the repressed, overwhelmingly often staged in and around dark waters or desolations of snow and ice, is an aesthetic hallmark of Norwegian horror cinema.
This book concerns itself with three main topics. First, why did Norway begin to produce horror movies regularly after 2000 and not before? Second, what types of horror have been the prevalent subgenres in Norwegian cinema, and how do these Norwegian films relate to the Anglo-American cinema that seems to be their chief inspiration?
3 - The Slashers of Norway
- Christer Bakke Andresen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
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- Norwegian Nightmares
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 03 June 2023
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- 30 September 2022, pp 35-52
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Summary
Jannicke is scared to death. Her friends have been killed, one by one, by the masked menace who hides in the mountain hotel where they have taken shelter. She is terrified and makes a desperate run for it, out into the freezing gloom of the brutal winter dusk. In a daze she stumbles through the door of the tool shed in the hotel yard. Breaking down on the floor, Jannicke finally begins to cry. Eyes closed, deep sobs, utter despair at the hopeless situation she finds herself in. Lying on her back, her sobs subsiding, she opens her eyes and sees a shotgun stowed under the ceiling. Jannicke loosens the gun from its rack and re-enters the hotel, where she knows there is a box of ammunition in the reception desk. The terrified girl gives way to another being, an angry woman about to avenge her friends and fight her way out of despair. She loads the shotgun and begins stalking her tormentor, armed and ready.
This is a scene from Cold Prey (Fritt vilt), the 2006 feature film debut of director Roar Uthaug. The main character Jannicke, portrayed by Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, goes through a moment typical of the slasher movie, a transition that turns a terrified girl into an angry woman. This subgenre archetype is removed to a Norwegian setting in Cold Prey, and Uthaug stages every beat of the character’s development from initial innocence to ultimate showdown with the dark and deadly force personified by the masked killer (Clover 1992: 21–42).
Cold Prey was the movie that really set the Norwegian horror tradition in motion, taking its cue from Dark Woods (Villmark). The film was easily the most intense and graphic portrayal of physical violence in Norwegian cinema up to that point, and it enjoyed great popularity and commercial success. Uthaug’s movie exploited the characteristics of the predominantly American slasher film and spawned two sequels, thus creating the first Norwegian horror movie franchise. This and the following chapter will examine the slasher subgenre and its particular emergence and resonance in Norwegian cinema post-2000.
Psychos and their victims: the slasher movie
The slasher subgenre of the horror movie usually tells the tale of a group of young people being stalked and murdered by a psychopathic killer.
3 - ‘The Sovereign People’ in Anxious Times
- Spyros A. Sofos, London School of Economics and Political Science
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- Book:
- Turkish Politics and 'The People'
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 11 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 69-121
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Summary
e canterò di quel secondo regno
dove l’umano spirito si purga
e di salire al ciel diventa degno.
Dante, Divina Commedia‘Othering’ and Turkishness
As already discussed in the preceding pages, leading nationalist figures, including Mustafa Kemal himself and İsmet Paşa (İnönü), followed the European imagination of modernity in establishing a ‘secular’ nation state, where the diverse Muslim populations were racialised under the single category, ‘Turk’. The founders of the Republic made clear on numerous occasions, especially after the turning point of 1925, that the Republic they envisaged would be a Republic for its Turkish citizens. The annihilation of the Armenian population and forced exchange of Greek Orthodox Christians with Greek Muslims were two critical events that contributed to the ‘post‐Ottoman’ realisation of Turkey’s image as an ethno‐sectarian state for non‐Arabic‐speaking Ottoman Muslims.
The tolerance of diversity that was exhibited during the War of Independence, and the references to an (at least internally) diverse Muslim ‘people’, had run their course and outlived their utility. As the new state had acquired international recognition through the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923, the republican elites felt that they were given a free hand to work towards the creation of a strong unitary state based on an ethnically homogeneous ‘people’. Alternative identities were thus seen as an aberration, with the potential to undermine the unity of the nation they sought to construct. In May 1925, Prime Minister İsmet Paşa, addressing an audience of schoolteachers, expressed clearly the aspiration to create a monolithic (yekpâre) state:
There are Turks who give this land its Turkish character. But this nation does not display the characteristics of the monolithic nation we would like to see. Only if this generation works consciously and seriously, under the guidance of science and life in general, devoting itself to it, can the political Turkish nation become a complete, mature cultural and social nation. In this monolithic nation, all foreign cultures must dissolve. There cannot be different civilizations within this national body. (Kaplan 1999:143–4)
In his address, İsmet Paşa admits that the Turkish nation is in a state of incompleteness and lacks maturity, and suggests that its maturation relies on the eventual prevalence of Turkish culture over all alternatives, which must dissolve as a result of a considerable intellectual and cultural effort.
Notes on Contributors
- Edited by Patrick Andelic, Mark McLay, University of Glasgow, Robert Mason
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- Book:
- Midterms and Mandates
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp x-xiii
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5 - Automobiles: The Modernist Gaze and Speed’s Visual Limit-field
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- By Enda Duffy
- Edited by Alex Goody, Oxford Brookes University, Ian Whittington, University of Mississippi
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 07 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 78-90
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Summary
‘ The rupture of metal and safety glass and the deliberate destruction of deliberately engineered artefacts, had left me lightheaded’ (Ballard 1985: 125). In literature, the swirling buildup of the first phase of appalled fascination at what the automobile had wrought converged on one notorious text, J. G. Ballard’s Crash. The automobile’s promise of the thrilling experience of unprecedented personal speed, and the pushing of its driver’s sensations to their limits, had made it a new kind of commodity: one which not only granted the usual pleasures of consumerism and status, but demanded new, extreme, use of one’s senses, and which induced, in that very use, pleasurable stress. For Ballard, at the end of this era, it was only at the moment of the crash that the full implications of this new model of what it meant to be human in interaction with technology could be mapped in fascinated horror. Before him, many artists had experimented with elucidating the joys of car speeds: from Marinetti’s pro-car oratorio in the 1909 ‘Futurist Manifesto’ to the car chases of the first Hollywood films and the Jaguar spills of James Bond; the admiration for drivers and driving in Proust’s La Recherche and the excitements of driving joyously delineated in Woolf’s Orlando; the windscreen painting of Manet and the speeding-car photos of Jacques-Henri Lartigue. They had all been willing to celebrate the car as commodity, but with an undercurrent of concern about what is unleashed in the driver-subject. The experimental strategies of the various modernisms were excellent for plumbing the limits and the possible new intensities – of attentiveness, endurance, adrenaline rush and stress – that this new technology incited in its users. Delineating these stresses in turn drove various modernisms to their own limits of representation. This chapter will first consider the two poles of consumer celebration and terror which greeted the arrival of the automobile; we will then examine representations of the first sense stressed by the experience of driving at speed, that of sight. Seeing at speed became a modernist topic and a spur to new kinds of modernist representations and genres, which in turn prompted engineers to develop still newer technologies of seeing. Capturing the speed gaze became the task of the moving image; it also fostered a telegraphic, cinematic turn in literature and art.
2 - Mongol Imperial Policies and Herat
- Shivan Mahendrarajah, University of St Andrews, Scotland
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- Book:
- A History of Herat
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 36-54
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Summary
Chinggisid Fault Lines
Herat became a prize in Chinggisid internecine struggles for supremacy. Chingiz Khan had designated Ögödei as political heir. There were other legitimate contenders: Chingiz’s brother, Temüge Otchigin, “on the basis of the seniority principle was best qualified to succeed” him. Another was Chingiz’s oldest son, Jochi, albeit of dubious birth: he was conceived around when his mother, Börte, was held captive by Chingiz Khan’s enemies. Chaghatai disrespected Jochi as a “bastard”; they even “engaged in fisticuffs.” Tolui’s and Ögödei’s views of Jochi are less certain. Chingiz accepted Jochi as his son and bequeathed to him a proportionate inheritance. But Jochi pre-deceased him (d.c. 1225).
In Chingiz Khan’s bequests, Jochi was appointed chief of the hunt, a pastime and training regimen for steppe warriors. Chaghatai was designated the keeper of Mongol laws (yasa); Tolui, “the command and organization of troops and the equipment of armies”; and Ögödei, administrator of empire. To each according to his talents was their father’s logic. Chaghatai accepted the selection of Ögödei but not Tolui. Consequent to his father’s death, Tolui, the youngest, and therefore the “hearth-prince” (otchigin)—guardian of the ancestral heartlands—ruled as regent.
Tolui convened the congress (quriltai) that confirmed Ögödei. Despite any private objections held by Tolui, since Ögödei had been designated by Chingiz, Mongol notables would have not permitted deviation. When Ögödei died (1241), Temüge Otchigin tried to seize the throne but failed. Ögödei’s empress, Töregene (r. 1242–46; d. 1246) ruled as regent during the interregnum. Töregene’s and Ögödei’s son, Güyük (r. 1246–48) was enthroned after more political theater. He and Jochi’s son, Batu (d. 654/1256), were estranged. Batu exercised dilatory tactics to prevent the quriltai that would elect Güyük. Toluids bided. Their opportunity emerged with Güyük’s death in 1248. Möngke (r. 1251–58), Tolui’s son, was crowned at the 1251 quriltai, following a two-year interregnum in which Güyük’s wife, Oghul-Qaimish, ruled.
Chinggisid fault lines outlined above were exacerbated by the senior Chinggisids’ interpretations of their patrimony’s relationship to the Mongol Empire. Each of Chingiz Khan’s sons had received a territorial appanage (yurt) with an accompanying ulus (specified tribes and peoples).
4 - The Cloistered Cleric: Confessional, Confinement, and Hopkins’s Poetics of Wavering
- Olivia Loksing Moy, Lehman College, City University of New York
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- Book:
- The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 06 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2022, pp 210-257
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Summary
he faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss.
G. M. Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland”There is perhaps no poet who more beautifully conveys the experience of Victorian doubt than G. M. Hopkins. So doubtful are his psychic grapplings with God, human suffering, and alienation that critics have happily secured his critical place among the modernists, within a world where God seems dead and the destructive nature of humankind reigns supreme. Yet Hopkins’s poetry is also restorative and ennobling. The irrepressible beauty of nature exudes from his verses, exemplifying the sheer beauty of dappled things. His homage to alliterative Old English verse heralds back to times more ancient with a reassuring stability. The rhythms of “chestnut-falls” and “finches’ wings” counterpoint the force of his sprung rhythm and arresting spondees: “Praise him.” The vibrant hues that color his lines create a boundless landscape in God’s glory: “descending blue,” “glassy peartree leaves and blooms,” “gold-vermillion,” “azurous hung hills,” “very-violet-sweet.” Hopkins’s poetry is one of solitude that carries the spirit of reflection, yet it does not necessarily find solace or repose. He revels in God’s grandeur but makes us question the heights to which our own fear and weakness can overwhelm and conquer faith. This “poetics of wavering” that I identify in Hopkins’s verses offers a recognition of the motion and movement that allow us to travel through the difficulties of life—whether “riding a river” or having the freedom to waver, to “fable and miss.”
Among the Victorian poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins would seem the furthest removed from the heavily commercial, xenophobic, and anti-Catholic world of 1790s English Gothic fiction. An English Jesuit priest who converted to Catholicism largely as a result of the Oxford Movement, Hopkins stands among the Victorians as a devotional poet who wrote serious spiritual verse. After being received into the church by John Henry Newman in October 1866, he resolved to become a priest in May 1868 upon returning to Hampstead. The burning of his early poems and the seven years of silence that followed his Jesuit initiation mark a commitment to his religious office that effectively cut him off from the public literary scene, though he was still engaged in serial and periodical print culture. It might be said that his literary circle consisted solely of a few family members and his friends, Robert Bridges, Coventry Patmore, and Richard Watson Dixon.