A question of tomorrow: Blanchot, surrealism and the time of the fragment

This article offers a close critical reading of Blanchot's essay on Surrealism, 'Tomorrow at Stake', raising a series of questions concerning the time of 'Surrealist experience' and its relation to those temporal structures inscribed within the concepts of modernity, the avant-garde, and (art) history itself. It is argued, through a posited connection to Romantic conceptions of the fragment, that those 'reflexes of the future' which for Surrealism determine the value of the present, may be understood, philosophically, in relation to diverse conceptions of the 'openness' of the question, in turn suggesting a more complex understanding of Surrealism's 'avant-garde' character.

How the sublime became "now": time, modernity and aesthetics in Lyotard's rewriting of Kant

Writing in the late 1980s, Nancy gives as examples of the "recent fashion for the sublime" not only the theoreticians of Paris, but the artists of Los Angeles, Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sublime may of course no longer seem quite so "now" as it did back then, whether in North America, Europe, or Japan. Simon Critchley, for one, has suggested that, at least as regards the issue of its conceptual coupling to "postmodernism," the "debate" concerning the sublime "has become rather stale and the discussion has moved on." Nonetheless, if that debate has indeed "moved on"-and thankfully so-it is not without its remainder, particularly in the very contemporary context of a resurgence of interest in explicitly philosophical accounts of art, in the wake of an emergent critique of cultural studies and of the apparent waning of poststructuralism's influence-a resurgence that has led to a certain "return to aesthetics" in recent Continental philosophy and to the work of Kant, Schelling, and the German Romantics. Moreover, as Nancy's precise formulations suggest, the "fashion" [mode] through which the sublime "offers itself"-as "a break within or from aesthetics"-clearly contains a significance that Critchley's more straightforward narration of shifts in theoretical chic cannot encompass. At stake in this would be the relation between the mode of fashion and art's "destiny" within modernity itself, from the late eighteenth century onwards. Such a conception of art's "destiny," as inextricably linked to that of the sublime, is not unique to recent French theory. In a brief passage in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno also suggests that the "sublime, which Kant reserved exclusively for nature, later became the historical constituent of art itself.... [I]n a subtle way, after the fall of formal beauty, the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism." As such, although the term has its classical origins in Longinus, its historical character for "us," both Nancy and Adorno argue, associates it specifically with the emergence of the modern. As another philosopher states: "It is around this name [of the sublime] that the destiny of classical poetics was hazarded and lost; it is in this name that ... romanticism, in other words, modernity, triumphed."

'The Rich Harmonics of Past Time': Memory and Montage

This article examines John Sommerfield’s 1936 novel, May Day, a work that experiments with multiple perspectives, voices and modes. The article examines the formal experiments of the novel in order to bring into focus contemporary debates around the aesthetics of socialist realism, the politics of Popular Front anti-fascism and the relationship between writers on the left and the legacies of literary modernism. The article suggests that while leftist writers’ appropriations of modernist techniques have been noted by critics, there has been a tendency to assume that such approaches were in contravention of the aesthetics of socialist realism. Socialist realism is shown to be more a fluid and disputed concept than such readings suppose, and Sommerfield’s adaptations of modernist textual strategies are interpreted as key components of a political aesthetic directed towards the problems of alienation and social fragmentation.

Reciprocal relations across time between basic values and value-expressive behaviors: A longitudinal study among children

Tracing children’s values and value-expressive behavior over a sixth-month period, we examined stability and change of values and behavior and the reciprocal relations between them. Three hundred and ten sixth-grade students in Italy completed value and value-expressive behavior questionnaires three times in three-month intervals during the scholastic year. We assessed Schwartz's (1992) higher-order values of conservation, openness to change, self-enhancement, and self-transcendence, as well as their respective expressive behaviors. Reciprocal relations over time between values and behaviors were examined using a cross-lagged longitudinal design. Results showed that values and behaviors had reciprocal longitudinal effects on one another, after the stability of the variables was taken into account (i.e., values predicted change in behaviors, but also behaviors predicted change in values). Our findings also revealed that: (1) values were more stable over time than behaviors, and (2) the longitudinal effect of values on behaviors tended to be stronger than the longitudinal effect of behaviors on values. Findings are discussed in light of the recent developmental literature on value change.

Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the Present

Sex, Time and Place extensively widens the scope of what we might mean by 'queer London studies'. Incorporating multidisciplinary perspectives – including social history, cultural geography, visual culture, literary representation, ethnography and social studies – this collection asks new questions, widens debates and opens new subject terrain. Featuring essays from an international range of established scholars and emergent voices, the collection is a timely contribution to this growing field. Its essays cover topics such as activist and radical communities and groups, AIDS and the city, art and literature, digital archives and technology, drag and performativity, lesbian London, notions of bohemianism and deviancy, sex reform and research and queer Black history. Going further than the existing literature on Queer London which focuses principally on the experiences of white gay men in a limited time frame, Sex, Time and Place reflects the current state of this growing and important field of study. It will be of great value to scholars, students and general readers who have an interest in queer history, London studies, cultural geography, visual cultures and literary criticism.