New Economic Criticism

This paper aims to account for what I describe as the gentrification of the humanist tradition by strengthening the bond between the epistemic merger of virtue theory and the still emergent category of political economy in eighteenth-century discourses. I use Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) to trace the shifting relation between character and currency to historical transformations in transatlantic slavery and the development of an innovative line of rhetoric capable of registering the historical novelty of ‘creditable’ yet ‘unreal’ value. I argue that the text articulates contemporary fears that the growth and diversification of character through the process of commodity production and exchange rendered virtue in a politically paradigmatic form archaic and remote. In other words, Austen's narrativized account of the advent of paper money and public credit dramatizes how these linguistic transformations resulted in a wider cultural unease about the socially determined indicators of value, character, and race, and meant that not merely the functioning, but the intelligibility of society depended upon the success of a program of reification. Yet I caution that the novel's conclusion signals that the success of this program remained anxiously unsettled at the close of the eighteenth century and that it instead acknowledges how the modern dialects of credit precariously subsumed grammars which had traditionally given shape to the material or otherwise ‘real’ foundations of civic personality and virtue.

Taking into account the ephemeral nature of performance, this book develops innovative approaches to the reconstruction of historical staging practices through the lens of Spanish classical theater. While poststructuralism and other theories problematize previous studies in performance historiography, this book argues that an interdisciplinary approach to staging reconstruction can produce illuminating conclusions. In this study, Vidler emphasizes the need to take into account, not only structures of culture, but also the human capacity to manipulate those structures for both individual and group expression. Through a detailed analysis of approaches to space, the body, the stage object and the spectator, it is possible to discern analyzable artifacts that permit us to reconstruct significant aspects of early modern stagings. Furthermore, because it actively engages and intertwines both objective and subjective modes of interpretation, Vidler argues that performance theory itself will be the locus of the next breakthroughs in interpretive studies.

As a luxury product, fashion is consumed not for rational considerations, but for its affective and emotive power. And it is in regards to this power that, as I will argue, the ongoing process of digitalisation is having its most profound effect. What are the parameters that define how, what and why we consume fashion online? How are marketing experts responding to the newfound agency of the consumer-turned-user? And what consequences do the fluid and non-linear communication constellations between brand and consumer in the digital realm entail for academic distinctions between media subjects and objects, between art and fashion or between content and commerce? This essay makes the attempt to tackle these questions by looking at three case studies: New York-based label Eckhaus Latta, Paris-based label Vetements and Canadian e-commerce site Ssense. Following my analysis of the hypertextual, user-centred marketing strategies used by these brands in order to build affective, emotional and social bonds with their customers, I will propose that the focus of the fashion industry has shifted away from the commodification of products towards the commodification of an expanded lifestyle offer – a development that I consider to be a direct result of the proliferation of digital communication technologies.

For undergraduate students and their teachers, this book surveys present-day stage and screen performances of early modern drama, introducing performance-oriented methodologies and pedagogies designed to complement text-based analysis. For academics, it brings together the criticism of leading performance scholars and practitioners, with extensive appendices listing performances for reference purposes.

Chapters:
1. Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince, Introduction
2. Lucy Munro, The Early Modern Repertory and the Performance of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries
3. Jeremy Lopez, The Seeds of Time: Student Theatre and the Drama of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries
4. Farah Karim-Cooper, The Performance of Early Modern Drama at Shakespeare’s Globe
5. Coen Heijes, Shakespeare’s Contemporaries at the Royal Shakespeare Company
6. Jacquelyn Bessell, The Actors’ Renaissance Season at the Blackfriars Playhouse
7. Rebecca McCutcheon and Sarah Thom, Dido, Queen of Carthage: Site-specific Marlowe
8. Roberta Barker, ‘A Freshly Creepy Reality’: Jacobean Tragedy and Realist Acting on the Contemporary Stage
9. Pascale Aebischer, Early Modern Drama on Screen
10. Jonathan Heron, Nicholas Monk and Paul Prescott, Letting the Dead Come Out to Dance: An Embodied and Spatial Approach to Teaching Early Modern Drama

Appendices:
11. Karin Brown, Professional Productions of Early Modern Drama, 1960-2010
12. Jeremy Lopez, Performances of Early Modern Drama at Academic Institutions Since 1909
13. Jeremy Lopez, Performances of Early Modern Plays by Amateur and Student Groups Since 1887

Selected bibliography"

We propose to read Francis Bacon's doctrine of the idols of the mind as an investigation firmly entrenched in his mental-medicinal concerns and we argue that an important role therein is played by the imagination. Looking at the ways in which the imagination serves to pinpoint several crucial aspects of the idolic mind permits us to signal the explicit or implicit cross-references between what in Bacon's tree of knowledge appear as distinct branches: the various faculties and their arts; the mind, the body, and their league; natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of man. The consequence of this rich picture of the diagnosis of the mind is an equally rich conception of the cure, which comprises both epistemic and physiological aspects. We extract the features of this integrated view out of Bacon's epistemological and medical natural historical writings, which we propose to read in tandem. We also propose a number of sources for Bacon's views on the imagination, whose variety accounts for the multivalent, sometimes elusive, but surely pervasive role of the imagination in the Baconian diagnosis and cure of the mind.

Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are ‘stored’ only superpositionally, and are reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about control of the personal past, and about relations between self and body.

The book’s historical argument is anchored by a reinterpretation of Descartes’ dynamic physiology of memory and strange philosophy of the body. English critics of Descartes’ view of memories as motions complained that mechanistic neurophilosophy could not guarantee order in memory, and instead sought techniques for controlling the brain. In a new account of 18th-century philosophers’ fears of confusion in remembering, the author demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Locke to Reid and Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on ‘the phantasmal chaos of association’. Finally, in a defence of connectionism against Jerry Fodor and against phenomenological and Wittgensteinian critics of passive mental representations, the author shows how problems of the self are implicated in contemporary sciences of mind. The book is an experiment in historical cognitive science, based on a belief that the interdisciplinary study of memory can exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences must aim.

CONTENTS (Download at http://www.johnsutton.net/PhilosophyandMemoryTraces.htm)
1 Introduction: traces, brains, and history
                  Appendix: memory and connectionism

Part I Animal spirits and memory traces
Introduction to Part I: Animal Spirits and Memory Traces
2 Wriggle-work: the quick and nimble animal spirits
3 Memory and 'the Cartesian philosophy of the brain'
                  Appendix 1: nerves, spirits, and traces in Descartes
                  Appendix 2: Malebranche on memory

Part II Inner discipline
Introduction to Part II: Inner Discipline
4 Spirit sciences, memory motions
5 Cognition, chaos, and control in English responses to Descartes' theory of memory
6 Local and distributed representations
7 John Locke and the neurophilosophy of self
                  Appendix: memory and self in Essay II.27
8 The puzzle of survival
9 Spirits, body, and self
10 The puzzle of elimination

Part III 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
Introduction to Part III: 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
11 Fodor, connectionism, and cognitive discipline
12 Associationism and neo-associationism
13 Hartley's distributed model of memory
14 Attacks on neurophilosophy: Reid and Coleridge

Part IV Connectionism and the philosophy of memory
Introduction to Part IV: connectionism and the philosophy of memory
15 Representations, realism, and history
16 Attacks on traces
17 Order, confusion, remembering

References
Index

This feminist-materialist study contributes towards a critique of the modern nuclear family in Western Europe by looking back at its cultural constructions and negotiations in early modern England. Connecting the traces of the past to the politics of today, the book offers further bricks to the building of a cultural history of the meanings and practices of family life in their continuity as well as discontinuity. The family is here defined as a discursive field that provides the framework for the analysis of the following interrelated concepts and categories, each being itself constituted by an ensemble of discourses: subjectivity, sex, gender, sexuality, love, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood and childhood, the public and the private, and the nation. While participating in postmodernity's deconstruction of these narratives, the author also dialectically links them to the non-discursive or material reality at the time of their initial production; i.e., to the historical specificity of the socio- economic and political fabric, in particular to the rise of possessive individualism, capitalism and the nation-state.

In cities across the nation, a few enjoy rising affluence while many struggle to get by. This situation is created in part by the practices of traditional economic development. Current trends threaten to worsen, unless we can answer the design challenge before us. Can we create an economic system—beginning at the local level—that builds the wealth and prosperity of everyone? The 20 cities profiled in this Democracy Collaborative report show the way forward. Economic development professionals and mayors are working in partnership with foundations, anchor institutions, unions, community organizations, progressive business networks, workers, and community residents. What’s emerging is a systems approach to creating an inclusive, sustainable economy where all can thrive. The work is place-based, fed by the power of anchor institutions, and built on locally rooted and broadly held ownership. It’s about building community wealth.

Публикуются Cчета Некрасова в конторских (бухгалтерских) книгах из архива журнала «Современник», а также все записи, относящиеся к нему. Публикация предваряется обзорными статьями, характеризующими специфику публикуемого документа, правильные способы работы с ним, ту информацию об экономике журнала, биографии Некрасова, сотрудников журнала, которую удается
из него извлечь. В приложениях публикуются записи, касающиеся Некрасова, в других финансовых документах журнала (из того же архива), а также неизвестные автографы поэта, обнаруженные в конторских книгах.

"The gendered body takes a phenomenological turn in Brower’s cosmopolitan essay on oral sexuality within philosophical, feminist, and lesbian traditions..."
  ("Editorial" by Michelle Iwen)

Abstract:
The 'traditional philosophical prestige' of seeing and touching, as analyzed by Emmanuel Levinas, comes to dominate the qualities of the other three senses. An investigation of the roles of these prestigious senses, along with the resultant privileged sense-organs of the hand and the eye, within phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and gender- or queer-theory suggests that the part of the prestige of touch will have been related to its function in the phenomenality of feeling. Yet the sense of taste seems to be as applicable, if not more so, to the phenomenal experience of selfhood based on feeling as theorized by Edmund Husserl and Jean-Luc Marion. The tongue, rather than the hand, is reconsidered as a sense-organ of touch in order to salvage the all but lost tang of the tangible. As such, the tongue and taste not only illuminate the shortcomings of binary gender theories based on either inner feeling or outer surface anatomy (or, either interior orifices or exterior appendages), but further discover a remarkable phenomenology of the body to be found in the writings of Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig that moves beyond certain masculine tendencies lurking about the hand and observation (as described by Freud and Butler). The phenomenal experience of the other that yields either empathy (for Husserl), love/eros (for Marion), or hearing and heeding 'Thou shall not kill' (for Levinas) has much to learn from the orality of women's writing. The third body, as written by Cixous, can experience the self as selftaste (as considered by Derrida) and experiences the other as the taste of the other. It is, thereby, opened to a love or a justice (or an erotic justice) beyond the proclamation of Levinas that 'ethics is an optics' as well as any ethics as a mere haptics to be found in Husserl or Marion, where feeling seems always determined by the hand.

This special issue explores how finance deploys time, structures the future, and interacts with actors and institutions that sometimes function according to very different temporal regimes. Finance capitalism's logic of recurrence, repetitive cycles, and successive ruptures has long been with us, but the essays in this special issue are particularly interested in how recent decades of intensified financialization have restructured temporal experience. They interrogate the production and dissemination of agency in an age of acceleration, risk, and uncertainty, asking how the temporality inscribed in financial transactions emerges from and simultaneously shapes individual and social practice. Topics covered range from the logic of finance and foundational concepts of financial theory to the intersection between objective structures and social practice, the role of literature, and finally questions of social insecurity, political action, and the possibility of resistance within a context of competing temporalities. In this introduction, the editors delineate some fundamental concepts and questions for our financial times.

This article explores Riddell's representational strategies around gender: in particular her male narrators and her female characters made monstrous by money. It argues that Riddell, conscious of social prohibitions on financial knowledge in women, employs male protagonists to subversive effect, installing in her stories a 'feminine' wisdom about the judicious use of wealth. Her narratives identify the Gothic potential of money to dehumanise, foregrounding the culpability of economic arrangements in many of the horrors of her society. While they contain pronounced elements of social critique, they ultimately however defend late-Victorian capitalism by proff ering exemplars of the ethical financial practice by which money's action is to be kept benign.

Collateral has since antiquity been used as a safeguard for contractual obligations, such as debt. But how did debt, and in particular government debt, itself become the most common form of collateral in the financial system? In other words, how did government debt become "safe"? The safety of sovereign debt corresponds to the establishment of sovereign creditworthiness: from sovereign bonds being charged a significantly higher interest rate than commercial loans in the Middle Ages to circulating "unsecured", that is, no longer requiring additional security in the form of either collateral or a high interest rate but trading merely on "full faith and credit". Modern finance theory and standard economics have treated the safety of sovereign debt as an assumption that has been fundamental to the main pricing models for stocks and derivatives in the form of the risk-free asset. Economic history at the same time however tells us that there is no such thing as a perfectly safe sovereign. How can one make sense of both these stories: sovereign safety as an axiom of modern finance as well as its historical contingency, relativism and dependency on perception? This chapter traces the answer to this question partly in a forgotten linkage of financial and imaginary fiction and argues that it is in the wider history of the public/ private  and fact/ fiction distinctions as well as their co-evolution that one should seek to place a history of sovereign safety.

Despite the significant body of criticism dedicated to economics and the history of the novel, there is still much work to be done exploring the dense interconnections between emerging capitalism and Victorian literature. Each of the three monographs that are the subject of this review offers original and important contributions to this critical terrain. All three explore how literary texts negotiate and narrativize complex ideas about economic structures and relationships. Although their theoretical commitments vary—theological and historicist for Blumberg, structuralist for Siegel, psychoanalytic and narratological for Kreisel—each is committed to practices of historicized interpretation, predicated on the assumption that literature contains, as Kreisel puts it, textual “symptoms” of its cultural and discursive context (15). Thus close textual readings illuminate how self-sacrifice shifts in the nineteenth century from a dominant cultural value to an ambivalent, morally ambiguous one (Blumberg); how condescension begins to take on its modern connotations as a patronizing power play that asserts rather than relinquishes superiority (Siegel); and how fears about the new capitalist system are embodied in novelistic images of feminized sexuality (Kreisel).

As a reader of her literary predecessors, and as a writer who herself contributed to the emerging literary tradition, Margaret Cavendish is an extraordinary figure whose role in early modern literary history has yet to be fully acknowledged. In this study, Lara Dodds reassesses the literary invention of Cavendish - the use she makes of other writers, her own various forms of writing, and the ways in which she creates her own literary persona - to transform our understanding of Cavendish's considerable accomplishments and influence.

In spite of Cavendish's claims that she did little reading whatsoever, Dodds demonstrates that the duchess was an agile, avid reader (and misreader) of other writers, all of them male, all of them now considered canonical - Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Bacon. In each chapter, Dodds discusses Cavendish's 'moments of reading' of these authors, revealing their influence on Cavendish while also providing a lens to investigate more broadly the many literary forms - poetry, letters, fiction, drama - that Cavendish employed. Seeking a fruitful exchange between literary history and the history of reading, Dodds examines both the material and social circumstances of reading and the characteristic formal features and thematic preoccupations of Cavendish's writing in each of the major genres. Thus, not only is our view of Cavendish and her specific literary achievements enhanced, but we see too the contributions of this female reader to the emerging idea of 'literature' in late seventeenth century England.

Most previous studies of Cavendish have been preoccupied with literary biography, looking into her royalist politics, materialist natural philosophy, and ambivalent protofeminism. The Literary Invention of Margaret Cavendish is significant, then, in its focus outward from Cavendish to her most enduring and positive contributions to literary history - her revival of an expansive model of literary invention that rests uneasily, but productively, alongside a Jonsonian aesthetics of the verisimilar and a Hobbesian politics of social strife.

The main idea of the paper is that the theoretical apparatus of memory studies contains a hidden liberal economy. The article refers to the works of William Shakespeare, Aleida Assmann, Wulf Kansteiner, and Tzvetan Todorov to present how the dis-individuation of memory-understood as a resignation from the psychological side of memory and a turning to symbolic contents of low intensity-makes memory theory similar to economic rules that govern the liberal market, including its focus on the rationality of exchange and dislike of external interventionism. The invisible hand of this market witnesses the flow of mnemonic monetary units, which this article calls 'memcoins'.

Об экономической метафоре (экономической модели объяснения) души и моральной аргументации в романе 1860-70-х гг. на материале романа Чернышевского, а также (более бегло) на примерах текстов Достоевского, Гончарова, Тургенева.

Корчинский А. «Жертва – сапоги всмятку»: этическая экономика в романе Н.Г. Чернышевского «Что делать?» // Изобилие и аскеза в русской литературе: Столкновения, переходы, совпадения / Сборник статей; под ред. Й. Херльта, К. Цендера. М.: Новое литературное обозрение, 2020. С. 103-121.

The basic idea pre-dates Lucas's contribution—related ideas are expressed as Campbell's law and Goodhart's law—but in a 1976 paper, Lucas drove to the point that this simple notion invalidated policy advice based on conclusions drawn from large-scale macroeconometric models. Because the parameters of those models were not structural, i.e. not policy-invariant, they would necessarily change whenever policy (the rules of the game) was changed. Policy conclusions based on those models would therefore potentially be misleading. This argument called into question the prevailing large-scale econometric models that lacked foundations in dynamic economic theory.

Opening up new perspectives and pathways, imagination and intellectual capacity play an important role in economic processes and are decisive for their future viability. Understood as a factor of economic growth, imagination is relevant to a cognitive-cultural understanding of capitalism and its related formulas like Human Capital and the Attention Economy. From a slightly different perspective and in different scope, though, treatises on intellectual capacities can also be found in 19th Century’s texts on the economy, as for example in “The Economy of Human Societies and Finance [Die Oekonomie der menschlichen Gesellschaften und das Finanzwesen]” (Stuttgart 1845) by Georg Cancrin, former Finance Minister of the Russian Empire.

In my presentation, I would like to focus on the economic and cultural relevance of imagination and intellectual capacity and their textual representations. In his canonical novel “Oblomov” (1859), Ivan Gončarov presents the main protagonist of his text, Il’ja Il’ič Oblomov, as the epitome of Russian economic and social backwardness. Although characteristically more complex and likeable than his counterpart, Andrej Ivanič Stol’c, Oblomov is unable to adopt the economic techniques his half Russian, half German friend is capable of. Instead of working on the economic recovery of his noble estate, most of the time Oblomov spends lying on the sofa and watching his housekeeper Agaf’ja Matveenva Pšenicyna doing the housework. With its contrast between the ever-static and over-sized Oblomov and the dynamic but rather mechanic Stol’c, Gončarov’s novel discusses the peculiarity of economic practices in relation to their cultural embeddedness and textual representability. The successful endeavors of Stol’c, however, are seldom presented in detail as if economic prosperity and perspicacity could not be depicted adequately. Instead, Oblomov’s economic powerlessness produces dizzy-making images of an idyllic and anachronistic oikonomia.

Against the grain of most commentators who focus on the inter-cultural differences postulated in the novel concerning economic practices and their valuation, I would like to stress a striking analogy on the meta-literary level between literary and economic writings concerning imagination and intellectual procedures. Those literary questions of economic representability and imagination show many analogies with the discussion of intellectual capacity in Cancrin’s “The Economy of Human Societies and Finance”. Irrespective of some generic differences, both literature and theory deal with the interweaving of economic and mental processes. In both cases, processes of economic and cultural valorization are related to imagination and intellectuality.