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Bolingbroke and Coriolanus each set in motion a ‘war machine’ with the respective results that have been pointed out. Other characters, also victims of abusive banishment, do not take part in such a dynamic of riposte; rather, they find another way of expressing their feelings of injustice, trying to sublimate their temptation to be revenged. Sometimes violence does erupt, but it is channelled away
Chapter 5 White feminism as war machine On 21 January 2017 more than 5 million women and people of other genders took to the streets in US cities. It was the day after President Trump’s inauguration. His candidacy for the presidency had put sexism and sexual violence centre stage, prompting seventeen allegations of harassment and/or assault. These arose after the leak of a 2005 recording in which Trump bragged about being able to ‘do anything’ to women. ‘When you’re a star’, he said, ‘they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.’ One of the
Bolingbroke’s and Coriolanus’ respective illegal returns are effective because they come with armed forces that are unexpected and, as such, convey the impression of having what Deleuze and Guattari, in their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, term a ‘war machine’. In A Thousand Plateaus , they explore several oppositions, such as ‘smooth space’ versus ‘striated space’, ‘game of
progress, the more we increase our chances for collective annihilation. Indeed, despite the potential human benefits of technological advancement, the triumph of the technical over the poetic in political affairs undermines the role of human creativity. How many critical theorists still have to affirm the importance of arts and humanities to the promotion of peace? Theory and science are not objective: we produce the technologies we desire, which are over-coded with all manner of assumptions and prejudices. So, as the technological mind continues to produce war machines
Dante Beyond Influence provides the first systematic inquiry into the formation of the British critical and scholarly discourse on Dante in the late nineteenth century (1865–1921). Overcoming the primacy of literary influence and intertextuality, it instead historicises and conceptualises the hermeneutic turn in British reception history as the product of major transformations in Victorian intellectual, social and publishing history.
The volume unpacks the phenomenology of Victorian dantismo through the analysis of five case studies and the material examination of a newly discovered body of manuscript and print sources. Extending over a sixty-year long period, the book retraces the sophistication of the Victorian modes of readerly and writerly engagement with Dantean textuality. It charts its outward expression as a public criticism circulating in prominent nineteenth-century periodicals and elucidates its wider popularisation (and commodification) through Victorian mass-publishing. It ultimately brings forth the mechanism that led to the specialisation of the scholarly discourse and the academisation of Dante studies in traditional and extramural universities. Drawing on the new disciplines of book history and history of reading, the author provides unprecedented insight into the private intellectual life and public work of Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, William E. Gladstone, and introduces a significant cohort of Dante critics, scholars and learned societies hitherto passed unnoticed.
As it recaptures a long-neglected moment in Dante’s reception history, this path-breaking book illuminates the wider socio-cultural and economic impact that the Victorian hermeneutic turn had in advancing women’s access to literary and scholarly professions, educational reform and discipline formation.
This book analyses three Shakespearean plays that mainly deal with abusive forms of banishment: King Richard II, Coriolanus and King Lear. These plays present with particular clarity the mechanism of the banishment proclamation and its consequences, that is, the dynamic of exclusion and its repercussions. Those repercussions may entail breaking the ban to come back illegally and seek revenge; devising strategies of deviation, such as disguise and change of identity; or resorting to mental subterfuges as a means of refuge. They may also lead to entropy – exhaustion, letting go or heartbreak. Each in its own way, they invite us to reflect upon the complex articulation between banishment and abuse of power, upon the strategies of resistance and displacement employed to shun or endure the painful experience of ‘deterritorialisation’; they put into play the dialectics of allegiance and disobedience, of fearlessly speaking and silencing, of endurance and exhaustion; they question both the legitimacy of power and the limits of human resistance. This study draws on French scholars in Shakespearean studies, and also on contemporary French historians, theorists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, essayists and philosophers, who can help us read Shakespeare’s plays in our time. It thus takes into account some of the works of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Gaston Bachelard, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Boris Cyrulnik and Emmanuel Housset. The hope is that their respective intellectual approaches will shed specific kinds of light on Shakespeare’s plays and initiate a fruitful dialogue with Anglo-Saxon criticism.
, because Bolingbroke’s and Coriolanus’ respective illegal returns are very swift and efficient, thanks to their armed forces (whether they are merely deterrent or fully in action), which evoke what Deleuze and Guattari term a ‘war machine’. On stage, the effect of speed, and even acceleration, is created by the spatio-temporal ellipsis of exile. None of the two plays presents us with what is expected from banishment, that is, ‘a
. Though they are officially, though unjustly, banished, some characters (Bolingbroke in King Richard II , Coriolanus) will not passively endure; once abroad, they initiate a dynamics of frontal counterattack and illegally return with a Deleuzian ‘war machine’. For this illegal return to succeed, expedient alliance must prevail over national loyalty, and the rebellious banished person appeals to mercenaries or turns mercenary himself, gives free
Vietnam War.8 It was certainly the most intensive and destructive instance of environmental militarization in French history. For although the battles of the Franco-Prussian War had transformed the countryside in which they were fought (see chapter 2), these changes were minor in comparison with the environmental repercussions of the First World War. The technological might of the ‘war machine’ seemed poised to completely obliterate human and nonhuman life along the Western Front and observers were shocked and dismayed by the war’s sterilization of the countryside.9
French’s claim that munitions shortages had doomed the offensive at Neuve-Chapelle during May 1915 (resulting in the so-called ‘shells-scandal’), encouraged efforts to impose greater control over, and direction of, the production of war materials. In the following month, Lloyd George’s Munitions of War Act established a super-ministry with powers to assess, allocate and direct the resources necessary to arm Britain’s war machine. Ostensibly, these measures provided protection against further dilution of the munitions workforce. In a broader sense, however, they