The Library of Babel, Eric Desmazieres by Sheila Cavanagh It’s no secret that times are tough for scholars in the humanities. Jobs are scarce, resources are stretched, and institutions of tertiary education are facing untold challenges. Those of us fortunate enough to hold tenured positions at financially stable colleges and universities may be the last…
Read MoreThe Monkey Painter, Alexandre Gabriel Ducamps, 1833 by Michael Ruse I understand that a contributor to the New Republic has deemed Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, the worst book of 2011. This reaction is understandable. There is an irritating jauntiness about the work, coming across as something altogether too…
Read MoreScreenprint from The Birth Project, Judy Chicago, 1980-85 by David Palumbo-Liu The formula of the “99 percent” seems at once incredibly rhetorical and real. We are used to hyperbole; we are less used to an absurdly lopsided figure that is actually matched by a reality. Poetic figuration meets statistical validity. Many of our society’s inequalities have…
Read MoreFrom Trainspotting, Miramax, 1996 by Julian Hanich In this essay [1] I try to categorize the range of artistic options that filmmakers currently have at hand to evoke bodily disgust. [2] Or, to reframe this approach in a slightly different manner: If we examine the variety of disgusting scenes at the movies, how can we…
Read MoreThe Reading Girl, Theodore Roussel, 1886 by Bill Benzon This post includes major sections from two posts I wrote in 2005 when I first began writing for The Valve: Learning to Read & the Need for Theory and Beyond Reading. The first generated extensive discussion that’s worth reading if you want to puzzle through the…
Read MoreJane Gallop by Natalie S. Loveless 1. Anecdotalizing Theory I always try to get us to that place where learning begins to dance. [2] The anecdote is a slippery knowledge maker, its politics suspect. On the one hand, it claims the authority of the first person, of presence. But this “I was there” aspect of…
Read Moreby Veronica Miranda During my thesis research in the communities of Saban and Huay Max, located in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico, I watched how children from three different familial units living on the same housing lot were constantly reorganized and re-circulated as adult family members came and went. For many rural communities in…
Read MoreCouncil Estate, Paul Cummings, 2009 by Jeffrey Stevenson Murer In ganging up on housing estates, in racist attacks or inter-state brinkmanship, how does the enemy become the Other? This peculiar purification process requires a narrative and a chance to ‘perform a boundary’. For local and national communities, leaders and politicians alike, it is one way…
Read MorePersepolis, Briton Rivière by Gregory Jusdanis Many travelers still seek solitude among the tourists, the luxury to communicate personally with the ruins. They long to leave their minds on idle, while they enter the vista before them, undisturbed by the other souls striving for the same illusion. I often feel this contradiction of being alone…
Read MoreCumbria Fire Brigades Union protest against cuts in November 2011 From “Heroes to Zeroes: Firefighters and the Mainstream Press”, by Dan Carrier: If you take the news peddled in the popular press as simple fact, it would not be surprising if you got hot under the collar about how your taxes are spent. All too…
Read MoreThe Revenger’s Tragedy, Royal Shakespeare Company, Pitlochry Festival Theatre 1965 production. by Attila Kiss “What brother, am I far enough from myself?” (The Revenger’s Tragedy, Vindice, 1.3.1) [2] The persistent employment of excessive violence on the early modern English stage was studied by Renaissance scholarship for centuries in diverse but rather formal or historicist ways,…
Read Moreby Joe Linker “Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it,” says Buckminster Fuller, explaining the title of his 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, in the chapter titled “Spaceship Earth.” The whole idea is a metaphor, comparing the planet to a machine. Is…
Read More1993-1994-1995, Bianca Runge by Thomas Vaessens Abstract In this article I will show how Dutch authors reoriented themselves from the late 1980s onwards in relation to the postmodern tradition they inherited. I will discuss the critique of postmodernism formulated by Dutch writers in the light of the following hypothesis. A new, late postmodern position has…
Read MoreThe Office: An American Workplace, NBC by Peter Fleming Power At Play: The Relationships Between Play, Work and Governance, by Niels Åkerstrom Andersen, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 192. Neo-liberalism seems to persist through a double life. For sure, it believes in itself like all forms of fundamentalist thought, but it also unconsciously divines its own…
Read MoreWhitechapel, London, 1972. Photograph by Ian Berry. by Ali Rattansi While analysing multiculturalism in the UK, the Netherlands and France in my recent Multiculturalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011), I had to confess that I had little idea what David Cameron’s “big society” project was going to mean for what remained of…
Read MoreMicha Josef Berdyczewski by Talia Lavin Introduction: the birth of Modern Hebrew The resurrection of Hebrew from a “dead,” [1] liturgical language into a living tongue remains dazzling, even a half-century after its initial establishment as an official state language. Once a purely literary language of Scripture and holy songs, Hebrew is now the native…
Read MoreThe “Red Room” at Brooke House Sixth Form College in Hackney, London by Melissa Benn Faster than we recognise, schools are becoming profit centres. The buildings, the teaching, the cleaning, the exam results are all ways to make money. But who benefits? Brooke House Sixth Form College in Hackney – known as BSix – has come…
Read Moreby Irakli Zurab Kakabadze There has been a big discussion about what is more effective during class struggle, Gandhian nonviolent strategy or going back to Leninist or Stalinist methods of violent uprising. The Indian movement of landless people Ekta Parishad has been around for the last 12 years. Rajagopal PV and Jill Carr-Harris have been…
Read Moreby Bill Benzon It is a truth universally acknowledged that What’s Opera, Doc? is one of the finest cartoons ever made. It satirizes opera, Wagner in particular; it parodies Disney’s Fantasia, and, for that matter, it parodies the routines of its stars, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. The production was, by Warner Brother’s standards, lavish,…
Read Moreby Joe Linker I was trying to recall Ezra Pound’s line, “And men went down to the sea in ships.” Fine, wonderful line, except that’s not what he said. What Pound said, opening “Canto I,” I now recalled, looking it up, was, “And then went down to the ship.” And I was going to say,…
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