{"title":"Serious Sex: A Re-viewing of the Films Lila Says and My Summer of Love","authors":"R. Cardullo","doi":"10.5325/soundings.103.1.0095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.103.1.0095","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article is a re-viewing of the early twenty-first-century films Lila Says and My Summer of Love from the point of view of their treatment of sex and sexuality, in contrast with the depiction of those subjects in past movies. The author observes that sex can be used in motion pictures—of which Doueiri’s and Pawlikowski’s are examples—in a way that is not exploitative. However obvious this may seem, it is most often not the case, and for reasons that can easily be adduced. Lila Says and My Summer of Love thus remind us, the author argues, of the possibilities inherent in a film art shorn of the gratuitousness of violent or pornographic sex—an art, that is, that knows how to use sex to achieve what it wants, or how to deploy “serious” sex toward significant thematic ends.","PeriodicalId":231294,"journal":{"name":"Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132492123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When the Westboro Baptist Church Came to Vassar College: A Quixotic Story of Foot Washing, Activist Pedagogy, and the Secular Liberal Arts","authors":"Jonathon Kahn","doi":"10.5325/soundings.103.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.103.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In 2013, the Westboro Baptist Church announced plans to picket Vassar College. This article recounts the quixotic attempt by student activists and myself to organize an embodied and affective form of counter-protest: a campus-wide act of foot-washing. Students were drawn to foot-washing because it represented an alternative model of knowledge formation based on awakening the affects of interaction and not achieving rational sovereignty. Despite failing, an urgent pedagogical case remains for reimagining ethical relations on campus. In light of the current political climate, the challenges of higher education may well be in engaging feelings that pass along campus affective circuits.","PeriodicalId":231294,"journal":{"name":"Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114241437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The World Made More Sufferable","authors":"Kyle Winkler","doi":"10.5325/soundings.103.1.0052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.103.1.0052","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that trust is an adjunct of rhetoric by looking at the Iliad and Sophocles’s play, Philoctetes, among other thinkers and philosophers. It suggests that trust is both within language and the body, in word and deed, and that rhetoric is the free, yet forgotten resource of all people in straits, whether critical or banal. It offers three consequences of trust in rhetoric: the implication of a civil society; a rhetorical taxonomy of personalities; and the breaking of apathy.","PeriodicalId":231294,"journal":{"name":"Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132151646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metro(Polis): Decentering Urbanity in Conceptualizing Metropolitanism","authors":"Sophia Basaldua-Sun","doi":"10.5325/soundings.102.4.0345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.102.4.0345","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article deconstructs the neologism metropolis to reconsider the constitutive role that metro and polis play in making metropolitan signification distinct. Where metropolis's urbanity, and particularly its international urbanity, has been emphasized in the past, this article focuses on the centralizing function of metropolis in order to theorize the term metropolis as a distinct spatial term that could become a method for conceptualizing and analyzing the relations of space organized in a centralized hierarchy. It synthesizes metropolitanisms from postcolonial studies, urban studies, and literary studies.","PeriodicalId":231294,"journal":{"name":"Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"178 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133045572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Spirits of Satire: Kant and Blake Read Emanuel Swedenborg","authors":"Allen Dunn","doi":"10.5325/soundings.102.4.0325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.102.4.0325","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Emanuel Swedenborg was a scientist and mystic whose religious writings attracted a large following in the late eighteenth century. Both Immanuel Kant and William Blake wrote satires of Swedenborg's work, but their satires mask a deep ambivalence. They are fascinated by, and sometimes envious of, Swedenborg's visionary powers even as they remain skeptical of these powers. Both the poet and the philosopher find a tentative resolution for this ambivalence in their accounts of poetry, which claim that poetic inspiration is a more trustworthy guide to the spirit world than Swedenborg's systematic theology, because poetry does not attempt to present the experience of the spirit world with the specious certainty of a metaphysical system.","PeriodicalId":231294,"journal":{"name":"Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128560239","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Monostatos: Racism in Die Zauberflöte","authors":"Steffen Lösel","doi":"10.5325/soundings.102.4.0275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.102.4.0275","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's (1756–1791) Die Zauberflöte (libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, 1751–1812) is one of the most popular operas in the history of the genre. And yet, for contemporary audiences, it is deeply problematic, marred by its stereotypical portrayal of the stage moor Monostatos, whom Georg Nikolaus von Nissen—second husband to Mozart's widow Constanze—describes in his biography of the composer as a \"low, cowardly slave [whose] submissive character was created in correspondence with his nation.\" This article looks at Monostatos in the philosophical and social context of the eighteenth century. It argues that the role reflects the pervasive racial stereotypes of Enlightenment-era anthropology—stereotypes that were so well entrenched that the opera's authors did not question them despite their personal acquaintance with a highly respected African living in Vienna at the time: Angelo Soliman (c. 1720/21–96).","PeriodicalId":231294,"journal":{"name":"Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132819792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editor's Introduction","authors":"J. Fife","doi":"10.5325/soundings.102.4.000v","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.102.4.000v","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's (1756–1791) Die Zauberflöte (libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, 1751–1812) is one of the most popular operas in the history of the genre. And yet, for contemporary audiences, it is deeply problematic, marred by its stereotypical portrayal of the stage moor Monostatos, whom Georg Nikolaus von Nissen—second husband to Mozart's widow Constanze—describes in his biography of the composer as a \"low, cowardly slave [whose] submissive character was created in correspondence with his nation.\" This article looks at Monostatos in the philosophical and social context of the eighteenth century. It argues that the role reflects the pervasive racial stereotypes of Enlightenment-era anthropology—stereotypes that were so well entrenched that the opera's authors did not question them despite their personal acquaintance with a highly respected African living in Vienna at the time: Angelo Soliman (c. 1720/21–96).","PeriodicalId":231294,"journal":{"name":"Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"81 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115430405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What Spaces Does Democracy Need?","authors":"Jan-Werner Müller","doi":"10.5325/SOUNDINGS.102.2-3.0203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/SOUNDINGS.102.2-3.0203","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The article asks what role different types of physical spaces play for democracy, based on an understanding of democracy as being in need of both a central site of decision making and informal spaces for deliberation and contestation. It then further asks whether the latter functions can be fulfilled by online spaces and also whether the internet might have something like an elective affinity with populism.","PeriodicalId":231294,"journal":{"name":"Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"144 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124721368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Democracy, Populism, and the Production of Superfluousness: Three Lessons from Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism","authors":"Peg Birmingham","doi":"10.5325/SOUNDINGS.102.2-3.0176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/SOUNDINGS.102.2-3.0176","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Recent publications warn of populism’s threat to democracy. Largely absent is a critique of democracy itself. This article turns to Arendt’s Origins and her claims that democracy contains the preparatory elements realized by imperialism, elements that crystallize into the event of totalitarianism. To ignore these democratic elements, she argues, is to misidentify the real threat confronting us today, namely, the production of superfluity, of which populism is an effect. This article argues that Arendt’s understanding of political action contains a new principle of democracy, a principle of “enduring renewal,” that addresses the superfluousness at the heart of modern democracy.","PeriodicalId":231294,"journal":{"name":"Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128971868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Ambivalent Role of Online Spaces in Political Engagement: A Response to Jan-Werner Müller","authors":"Sarah E. Vitale","doi":"10.5325/SOUNDINGS.102.2-3.0217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/SOUNDINGS.102.2-3.0217","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that Jan-Werner Müller in “What Spaces Does Democracy Need?” overemphasizes the danger for democratic engagement inherent in the medium of the internet. It claims that the main problem with online discourse is one that comes from without and one that faces in-person discourse as well, and that is the danger of increased privatization and the erosion of a truly public sphere. Nonetheless, online sites can and do still play an important role in our political projects, a role that is not necessarily less significant than the role that physical sites play.","PeriodicalId":231294,"journal":{"name":"Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122462548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}