Articoli di riviste sul tema "1865-1936 – Criticism and interpretation"

Abstract For the past 150 years, American art and art criticism have undergone important cultural and ideological transformations that are explanatory both of their historical evolution and of the possibility of being divided into several stages. In my interpretation, art criticism cuts across the historical evolution of art in the United States, according to the following cultural and ideological paradigms: two predominant cultural ideologies of art between 1865-1900 and 1960-1980, respectively; two other aesthetic and formalist ideological shifts in the periods between 1900- 1940 and 1940-1960, respectively, and one last pluralist approach to the arts after 1980. Even if this conceptualisation of art criticism in America might seem risky and oversimplifying, there are conspicuous and undeniable arguments supporting it. In a previous study published by American, British and Canadian Studies, I provided conceptual justifications both for the criteria dividing the cultural and the ideological within the overall assessment of American art by art critics and for the analysis and interpretation of the first two important temporal periods in the field of art criticism, 1865-1900 and 1908-1940. The present study continues by analyzing the cultural and ideological stances of American art criticism after 1940 and argues for certain paradigmatic shifts from one period to another.

Despite various interpretations of Heidegger's philosophy, he is undeniably a deep critic of the metaphysical tradition in European philosophy. His task of overcoming metaphysics once again aroused interest in the fundamental issues of life in the era of the total dominance of private sciences. In the article, the authors explore the concept of metaphysics and its criticism in the work of M. Heidegger, as well as subsequent interpretations, in particular by O. Peggeler (“New Ways with Heidegger”, 1992). Criticism of metaphysics was a necessary condition for overcoming it to build a fundamental ontology. Having experienced the influence of Nietzsche, Heidegger does not remain a Nietzschean, because he considers him the last metaphysician to be overcome. In this regard, Peggeler recognizes Heidegger's main work not as “Being and Time”, but as “Reports to Philosophy” (1936), where he sought to reveal the primary sources of the concept of metaphysics. Heidegger's views regarding the interpretation of the development of metaphysics in different historical eras are specially considered.

The paper aims is to present and evaluate the Review the History of Serbian Literature A. N. Pipin's as a classical history of Serbian literature that became part of the national culture. The development of the history of literature among Serbs, as an independent discipline and its modest beginnings, can be found in the first decades of the 19th century, in the time of Dositej and Vuk. In its beginnings, the history of literature was a "story" about the literary past of a nation and at its core was - criticism. This main idea as an axiom is a signpost that leads from the history of literature, which has long performed the function of criticism, to the genesis of literary criticism as the youngest branch of literary science and the way it formulated and exercised its functions in conditions when literary history was in a certain measures and history of the people. The Serbs received the first History of Serbian Literature (1865) from the pen of Pavel Jozef Šafarik (1795–1861), a Protestant and German student who served in Novi Sad. The next history of Serbian literature was also written by a foreigner, the Russian Alexander Nikolaevich Pipina (1833–1904). His Review the History of Serbian Literature (1865) has not been fully translated into Serbian. When marking questions from the new Serbian literature, Pipin's approach leads to a synthesis of ideas about cultural and political and national development. Slavery replaced the idea of revival "among Orthodox Serbs who fled to Austria". From that perspective, he views the development of national literature as an important part of culture and identity. Pipin also deals with the issue of national identity and the awakening of the national consciousness of the Slavs in his extensive study "Panslavism in the Past and Present" (1878), in which "the Serbian national question is incorporated into the general critique of Russian official policy and Slavophile orientation in the Balkans during Eastern Europe crisis". In this paper, we value his competence, cultural mission, the gift of the comparator, without which there is no great literary historian, and his practical contribution to classifying Serbian literature and culture in the European context.

This study aims to explain how the Muslim community responded to the presence of Christians in Cipatujah, as it is known that Christians came to Cipatujah around 1936, namely Javanese people from Salatiga who were brought by the leadership of a Dutch missionary named Tuan A. Van Emmerik. The method used in this research is the historical method by carrying out the stages starting from data collection (heuristics), levers (criticism), interpretation (interpretation) and writing (historiography). Data collection techniques used in this research are text study, observation. and interviews. The results of this study show that there have been ups and downs of relations between Muslims and Christians in Cipatujah. This can be seen from several conflicts that have occurred from the riots in 1996 to the burning of churches and Christian settlements in 2001. Keywords: Response, Muslims, Christians, Cipatujah.

The Russian translation reception of Robert Burns's poem “Who is that at my bower-door?..” (1783) is for the first time considered in the article. It is emphasized that the comic work did not attract the attention of Russian translators until 1862, when the unsatisfactory interpretation of V. D. Kostomarov, deprived of the emotionality of the English original, came out. The results of the analysis of translations of the poem created by M. N. Shelgunov (1879), T. L. Shchepkina-Kupernik (publ. 1936), S. Ya. Marshak (1939), S. Sapozhnikov (publ. 2014), E. D. Feldman (2017), A. V. Krotkov (publ. 2018) are presented. The perception of Burns’ work in Russian literary criticism and literary criticism is comprehended. In particular, numerous reviews and studies are analyzed (A. T. Twardowski, K. I. Chukovsky, E. G. Etkind, T. B. Liokumovich, R. Ya. Wright-Kovaleva, A. Bobyleva), caused by S. Ya. Marshak translation, who, despite all his liberties, preserved the atmosphere of a lively conversation between two people, and emphasized their intonational, emotional and gender differences. It is noted that, having entered into a polemic with S. Ya. Marshak, who made Burns unnecessarily classic and stylistically “smooth”, modern translators created interpretations in the spirit of courteous poetry, largely devoid of the aesthetics of the original, its unique melody.

The article is devoted to the influence on the evolution of the Soviet political economy of the statement of I.V. Stalin, which appeared in 1936, about the implementation in the USSR of «basically the first phase of communism-socialism». This formulation became canonical and was not questioned throughout the Soviet period. Reacting to the apparent inconsistencies of socio-economic practice with classical Marxist ideas about socialism, some political economists went out of criticism of Marxism, leaning towards essentially non-Marxist interpretations of socialism in general and Soviet socialism in particular. Other scholars have sought ways to reconcile Soviet reality with the Marxist classics by improving the former, while remaining convinced that the USSR is a completely socialist country. Why did this Stalinist formula appear and was sincerely accepted, including for theoretical reasons, by the scientific community? In what historical and methodological plane could the problem of a completely Marxist interpretation of Soviet socialism be adequately resolved? The answers to these questions are offered by the author of the article.

Abstract The purpose of the strictly protected area of the Białowieża National Park (BNP) established in early 1900s, was to protect a compact block of the Białowieża forest from any direct human influence and activity. Its founders considered it a ‘laboratory of nature’ In 1936, five rectangular plots with a total area of 15.5 ha (ca. 0.3% of the BNP) were set up for regular monitoring of stand development with regards to the initial state and variability of soil conditions. During the first 76 years of the project, a steady increase in the proportion of hornbeam and lime tree at the expense of shade-intolerant species was observed. This trend has been interpreted by the researchers involved in the monitoring of the permanent BNP plots to constitute a biodiversitythreatening development caused by preservation efforts. Such an interpretation has been widely incorporated in the public debate by political authorities and the forestry sector. In this critical article I challenge the major arguments presented by the key expert in silviculture, Prof. B. Brzeziecki. My criticism is directed at the methodological approach as well as at the data interpretation.

During 1935, 1936. and 1938, in Belgrade was published a monthly magazine The Southslavic Choral Union Herald [Vesnik Juznoslovenskog pevackog saveza]. Three years represent 16 issues or 119 articles, or 216 pages. The first editor was Milenko Zivkovic (1901-1964), a Serbian composer of the younger generation, the chief secretary of the Southslavic Choral Union. The magazine was conceived as a newsletter. Choral societies, members of the South Slavic Choral Association, were given the opportunity to stay informed about the work of the Union and the activities of choral societies throughout the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Therefore, Herald published numerous news, informative articles, speeches and obituaries. However, the Herald got physiognomy of a music magazine thanks to essays on the significant figures of Serbian music (Davorin Jenko, Stevan Mokranjac), texts about the problems of choral technique and interpretation, critical reviews of sheet music, and musical criticism. These texts were written by the leading Serbian musicians of the time: Milenko Zivkovic, Branko Dragutinovic, Petar Krstic, Mihailo Vukdragovic, Miloje Milojevic and Richard Schwartz. The Herald represented the ideology of integral Yugoslavism. The assassination of Yugoslav king Alexander Karadjordjevic during his visit to Marseilles in 1934 strongly affected the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which has long been in the political crisis. However, the Herald and the Southslavic Choral Union have remained faithful to the ideology of Yugoslavism and to King Alexander as its symbol.

I provide a close analysis of truth and freedom in Heidegger’s work of the Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie). The work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling is shown to play a decisive role in this key text of Heidegger’s, leading him to an understanding of the self in terms of freedom, community, culture, and history that carries important implications for political philosophy In attempting to uncover a thoughtful and elucidating interpretation of the Beiträge zur Philosophie, one of the most promising portions of Heidegger’s canon to which one can turn for assistance in developing a reading is to the lecture courses of the surrounding period as they provide strong indications of Heidegger’s textual sources of the time, and one of the most often overlooked sources for studying the Beiträge is Heidegger’s 1936 lecture, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom..2 William J. Richardson’s work has familiarly encouraged us to think of Heidegger’s thought in two markedly differing periods separated by a turn, a helpful and insightful approach to which Heidegger studies remains indebted, though this story will not entirely be my own preferred take on Heidegger’s work in the present project. These investigations are nonetheless indebted to Richardson in arguing that one can arrive at a better understanding of the relationship between the early and the late material such as to elucidate the Beiträge by drawing on his finding of a Kantian thematic in the early work, an interpretive move which is also well backed by Reiner Schürmann’s work.3 My proposal in this project is that bearing this in mind, the late Heideggerian corpus, particularly the Beiträge, can be understood through the lens of German Idealism and its relationship to a criticism of Kantian thought. By problematizing certain key elements of Heidegger’s late thought that are drawn from F. W. J. Schelling and establishing a hermeneutic between these concepts and Schelling’s writings, I will use a reading of Schelling to help us begin to understand the Beiträge as a somewhat fractured continuation and completion of the study of being that was earlier carried out primarily through an analytic of Dasein. Heidegger imports crucial concepts from Idealism and applies his method of destructive philosophical appropriation to develop his own notions of the history of being, the event of appropriation, and community, revolving around what I argue is a very original appropriation of Schellingian concepts of freedom, ground, and jointure in the Beiträge.

In the first part of chapter 2 of book II of the Physics Aristotle addresses the issue of the difference between mathematics and physics. In the course of his discussion he says some things about astronomy and the ‘ ‘ more physical branches of mathematics”. In this paper I discuss historical issues concerning the text, translation, and interpretation of the passage, focusing on two cruxes, ( I ) the first reference to astronomy at 193b25–26 and ( II ) the reference to the more physical branches at 194a7–8. In section I, I criticize Ross’s interpretation of the passage and point out that his alteration of ( I ) has no warrant in the Greek manuscripts. In the next three sections I treat three other interpretations, all of which depart from Ross's: in section II that of Simplicius, which I commend; in section III that of Thomas Aquinas, which is importantly influenced by a mistranslation of ( II ), and in section IV that of Ibn Rushd, which is based on an Arabic text corresponding to that printed by Ross. In the concluding section of the paper I describe the modern history of the Greek text of our passage and translations of it from the early twelfth century until the appearance of Ross's text in 1936.

Volume 52 of the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society contained two articles (Salisbury 1986; Tipping 1986) critical of our paper ‘The stratigraphy of Kirkhead Cave, an upper palaeolithic site in northern England’ (Gale and Hunt 1985). Here we reply.Before dealing with the criticisms made by Salisbury, we correct the factual errors in his paper.1. Bolton and Morris ‘… excavated through, and ultimately removed some 5 to 7 metres of cave earth…’ (Salisbury 1986, 321). In fact, the reports indicate a maximum depth of excavation of 7 ft (2.1 m) (Bolton 1864, cclii) or 8 ft (2.4 m) (Morris 1865–66, 360, 361; 1866, 169, 170; Bolton 1869, 167–68).2. Bolton and Morris's ‘… publications are of little value today, and both may be considered to have been “bone hunters” and collectors’ (Salisbury 1986, 321). The assertion that Bolton and Morris's excavation reports are of little value suggests that Salisbury is not familiar with the wealth of early literature on this site. The reports provide a picture of a rich and varied assemblage of artefacts and macrofauna in the unit overlying the stalagmite floor in the cave. Information is also provided on the lithology of that unit. Interpretation of these reports allows the reconstruction of the stratigraphic context of the finds: we direct Salisbury's attention to Gale and Hunt (1985, 296–97) for an indication of the stratigraphic reconstruction possible from the information given in these early publications.

Durante los últimos años, el libro Raíces del Brasil y su autor, Sergio Buarque de Holanda, inscripto en el canon del pensamiento social brasileño como uno de los principales intelectuales pensadores y articuladores de la nación, han recibido por parte de la historiografía aportes en una fortuna crítica que revisita su interpretación y destaca nuevas posibilidades de entender la revisión que el propio autor realizó a partir de la segunda edición del texto, aspecto que, hasta ese momento, estaba al margen de los argumentos políticos movilizados por sus intérpretes de ciencias sociales. Formando parte de ese conjunto de nuevas investigaciones, este artículo tiene el objetivo principal de discutir la producción historiográfico-política contemporánea que se dedica a explicar los cambios introducidos en Raíces del Brasil, problematizando las clasificaciones del texto de acuerdo con las visiones políticas liberal-democráticas, radical-democráticas y, más recientemente, de lecturas que le atribuyen posturas que se aproximan al conservador-autoritarismo de los años 1930.AbstractSérgio Buarque de Holanda, author of Roots of Brazil, has been interpreted by his critics as one of main intellectual thinkers of the proccess to brazilian national construction. During the last years, his critical fortune revisited the book to start a reevaluation of its political message. In this perspective, the analysts emphasized the need to analyze the author’s revision after the second edition of the text, an aspect that, until that moment, was outside the political arguments mobilized by its interpreters of social sciences. As a part of this set of new research, this article has the main objective of discussing the contemporary historiographic-political production that is dedicated to explain changes made in Roots of Brazil, in order to problematize the classifications of the text according to liberal-democratic political visions, radical-democratic or, more recently, readings that attribute positions that approach the conservative-authoritarianism of the 1930s.We intend to show that proposing an explanation of the reasons that guided the revision of the original 1936 version of this classic text requires advancing beyond the orbit of political arguments, since, rather than defining the essence of its original edition and thinking in the possibility of defining also its revised and «final» versions, what matters, above all, is to understand the logic of the movement that this revision gave to the construction of the discourse that emanates from it, once it is considered one of the key texts to interpret this country.

The article discusses the features of the concept of Ukrainian literature teacher and professor of KhINO, the head of the department of the history of Ukrainian literature (1933–1936) of the Kharkov University V. Koryak (1889–1937). His aesthetic views combined Marxism, sociological criticism and the ideas of building “proletarian culture”. The sociological concept of the dynamics of the national literary process and the interpretation of works of art reflected the Marxist approach to the analysis of writing and significantly influenced the Ukrainian literary criticism of the 1920s, as well as its further transformations during the period of “socialist realism”. V. Koryak taught at KhINO since 1925, and having defended his thesis, he first became the so-called “red professor”, from 1927 - a visiting professor, while continuing to teach the course of history of Ukrainian literature. He was also the head of the Soviet literature room at the T. G. Shevchenko Institute of Literature, and from 1933 to 1936, after the restoration of Kharkov University, he headed the department of the history of Ukrainian literature. The basic terms of the sociological concept of V. Koryak were made public in the textbook of Ukrainian Literature (1928), which was used to teach this subject. This course was the first attempt to synthesize the problematic issues of "Marxist literary criticism" to create an original concept of the history of Ukrainian literature based on the sociological method. Negative and positive features of V. Koryak’s literary-critical concept were reflected to the greatest extent in his interpretation of T. G. Shevchenko’s works. A significant amount of his extraordinary ideas can also be traced in the interpretation of the works of other Ukrainian writers.

The train that appeared in Dutch East Indies in the mid 19th century was originally used for plantation product transport. However, the train was also used as transportation for the public. In 1894, between Batavia and Surabaya was connected with the railway line. Both cities can be reached by train in two days. To reduce travel time between those two cities, the Dutch East Indies railway company, Staatsspoorwegen was launched two high-speed trains, Eendaagsche Express in 1929 and Java Nacht Express in 1936. These two high-speed trains brought changes for railways condition in Dutch East Indies, especially in Java. During operation, these two high-speed trains also had interesting stories to write about. To write this problem, historical methods are used which consisting of heuristics, criticism, interpretation, and historiography. Based on the research conducted, these two high-speed trains made the travel time of Batavia – Surabaya 12 hours and made railways technology in the Dutch East Indies develop.

Iain Sinclair is a writer who is synonymous with a city. Sinclair’s sustained literary engagement with London from the mid 1960s has produced a singular account of place in that city (Bond; Baker; Seale “Iain Sinclair”). Sinclair is a leading figure in a resurgent and rebranded psychogeographic literature of the 1990s (Coverley) where on-foot wandering through the city brings forth narrative. Sinclair’s wandering, materialised as walking, is central to the claim of intimacy with the city that underpins his authority as a London writer. Furthermore, embodied encounters with the urban landscape through the experience of “getting lost” in urban environments are key to his literary methodology. Through works such as Lights Out for the Territory (2007), Sinclair has been repeatedly cast as a key chronicler of London, a city focused with capitalist determination on the future while redolent, even weighted, with a past that, as Sinclair says himself, is there for the wanderer to uncover (Dirda).In this essay, we examine how Sinclair’s wandering makes place in London. We are interested not only in Sinclair’s wandering as a spatial or cultural “intervention” in the city, as it is frequently positioned in critiques of his writing (Wolfreys). We are also interested in how Sinclair’s literary methodology of wandering undertakes its own work of placemaking in material ways that are often obscured because of how his work is positioned within particular traditions of wandering, including those of psychogeography and the flâneur. It is our contention that Sinclair’s wandering has an ambivalent relationship with place in London. It belongs to the tradition of the wanderer as a radical outsider with an alternative practice and perspective on place, but also contributes to contemporary placemaking in a global, neo-liberal London.Wandering as Literary MethodologyIain Sinclair’s writing about London is considered both “visionary” and “documentary” in its ambitions and has been praised as “giving voice to lost, erased, or forgotten histories or memories” (Baker 63). Sinclair is the “raging prophet” (Kerr) for a transforming and disappearing city. This perspective is promulgated by Sinclair himself, who in interviews refers to his practice as “bearing witness” to the erasures of particular place cultures, communities, and their histories that a rapidly gentrifying city entails (Sinclair quoted in O’Connell). The critical reception of Sinclair’s perambulation mostly follows Michel de Certeau’s observation that walking is a kind of reading/writing practice that “makes the invisible legible” (Baker 28). Sinclair’s wandering, and the encounters it mobilises, are a form of storytelling, which bring into proximity complex and forgotten narratives of place.Sinclair may “dive in” to the city, yet his work writing and rewriting urban space is usually positioned as representational. London is a text, “a system of signs […], the material city becoming the (non-material) map” (Baker 29). Sinclair’s wandering is understood as writing about urban transformation in London, rather than participating in it through making place. The materiality of Sinclair’s wandering in the city—his walking, excavating, encountering—may be acknowledged, but it is effectively dematerialised by the critical focus on his self-conscious literary treatment of place in London. Simon Perril has called Sinclair a “modernist magpie” (312), both because his mode of intertextuality borrows from Modernist experiments in form, style, and allusion, and because the sources of many of his intertexts are Modernist writers. Sinclair mines a rich seam of literature, Modernist and otherwise, that is produced in and about London, as well as genealogies of other legendary London wanderers. The inventory includes: “the rich midden of London’s sub-cultural fiction, terse proletarian narratives of lives on the criminous margin” (Sinclair Lights Out, 312) in the writing of Alexander Baron and Emanuel Litvinoff; the small magazine poetry of the twentieth century British Poetry Revival; and the forgotten suburban writings of David Gascoyne, “a natural psychogeographer, tracking the heat spores of Rimbaud, from the British Museum to Wapping and Limehouse” (Atkins and Sinclair 146). Sinclair’s intertextual “loiterature” (Chambers), his wayward, aleatory wandering through London’s archives, is one of two interconnected types of wandering in Sinclair’s literary methodology. The other is walking through the city. In a 2017 interview, Sinclair argued that the two were necessarily interconnected in writing about place in London:The idea of writing theoretical books about London burgeoned as a genre. At the same time, the coffee table, touristy books about London emerged—the kinds of books that can be written on Google, rather than books that are written by people of the abyss. I’m interested in someone who arrives and takes this journey into the night side of London in the tradition of Mayhew or Dickens, who goes out there and is constantly wandering and finding and having collisions and bringing back stories and shaping a narrative. There are other people who are doing things in a similar way, perhaps with a more journalistic approach, finding people and interviewing them and taking their stories. But many books about London are very conceptual and just done by doing research sitting at a laptop. I don’t think this challenges the city. It’s making a parallel city of the imagination, of literature. (Sinclair quoted in O'Connell)For Sinclair, then, walking is as much a literary methodology as reading, archival research, or intertextuality is.Wandering as Urban InterventionPerhaps one of Sinclair’s most infamous walks is recorded in London Orbital (2003), where he wandered the 127 miles of London’s M25 ring road. London Orbital is Sinclair’s monumental jeremiad against the realpolitik of late twentieth-century neo-liberalism and the politicised spatialisation and striation of London by successive national and local governments. The closed loop of the M25 motorway recommends itself to governmental bodies as a regulated form that functions as “a prophylactic, […] a tourniquet” (1) controlling the flow (with)in and (with)out of London. Travellers’ movements are impeded when the landscape is cut up by the motorway. Walking becomes a marginalised activity it its wake, and the surveillance and distrust to which Sinclair is subject realises the concerns foreshadowed by Walter Benjamin regarding the wanderings of the flâneur. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin quoted a 1936 newspaper article, pessimistically titled “Le dernier flâneur” [The last flâneur]:A man who goes for a walk ought not to have to concern himself with any hazards he may run into, or with the regulations of a city. […] But he cannot do this today without taking a hundred precautions, without asking the advice of the police department, without mixing with a dazed and breathless herd, for whom the way is marked out in advance by bits of shining metal. If he tries to collect the whimsical thoughts that may have come to mind, very possibly occasioned by sights on the street, he is deafened by car horns, [and] stupefied by loud talkers […]. (Jaloux, quoted in Benjamin 435)Susan Buck-Morss remarks that flâneurs are an endangered species in the contemporary city: “like tigers, or pre-industrial tribes, [they] are cordoned off on reservations, preserved within the artificially created environments of pedestrian streets, parks, and underground passages” (344). To wander from these enclosures, or from delineated paths, is to invite suspicion as the following unexceptional anecdote from London Orbital illustrates:NO PUBLIC RITE [sic] OF WAY. Footpaths, breaking towards the forest, have been closed off. You are obliged to stick to the Lee Navigation, the contaminated ash conglomerate of the Grey Way. Enfield has been laid out in grids; long straight roads, railways, fortified blocks. […] In a canalside pub, they deny all knowledge of the old trace. Who walks? “There used to be a road,” they admit. It’s been swallowed up in this new development, Enfield Island Village. […] The hard hat mercenaries of Fairview New Homes […] are suspicious of our cameras. Hands cover faces. Earth-movers rumble straight at us. A call for instruction muttered into their lapels: “Strangers. Travellers.” (69-70)There is an excess to wandering, leading to incontinent ideas, extreme verbiage, compulsive digression, excessive quotation. De Certeau in his study of the correlation between navigating urban and textual space speaks of “the unlimited diversity” of the walk, highlighting its improvised nature, and the infinite possibilities it proposes. Footsteps are equated with thoughts, multiplying unchecked: “They are myriad, but do not compose a series. […] Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities” (97). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the erratic trajectories, digression, and diversion of Sinclair’s wanderings are aligned with a tradition of the flâneur as homo ludens (Huizinga) or practitioner of the Situationist derive, as theorised by Guy Debord:The dérive entails playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey or the stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view, cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. (“Theory of the dérive” 50)Like Charles Baudelaire’s painter of modern life, Sinclair is happily susceptible to distraction. The opening essay of Lights Out is a journey through London with the ostensible purpose of diligently researching and reporting on the language he detects on his travels. However, the map for the walk is only ever half-hearted, and Sinclair admits to “hoping for some accident to bring about a final revision” (5). Sinclair’s walks welcome the random and when he finds the detour to disfigure his route, he is content: “Already the purity of the [walk] has been despoiled. Good” (8). Wandering’s Double Agent: Sinclair’s Placemaking in LondonMuch has been made of the flâneur as he appears in Sinclair’s work (Seale “Eye-Swiping”). Nevertheless, Sinclair echoes Walter Benjamin in declaring the flâneur, as previously stereotyped, to be impossible in the contemporary city. The fugeur is one détournement (Debord “Détournement”) of the flâneur that Sinclair proposes. In London Orbital, Sinclair repeatedly refers to his wandering as a fugue. A fugue is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a “flight from or loss of the awareness of one’s identity, sometimes involving wandering away from home, and often occurring as a reaction to shock or emotional stress.” As Sinclair explains:I found the term fugueur more attractive than the now overworked flâneur. Fugueur had the smack of a swear word […]. Fugueur was the right job description for our walk, our once-a-month episodes of transient mental illness. Madness as a voyage. […] The fugue is both drift and fracture. (London Orbital, 146)Herbert Marcuse observed that to refuse to comply with capitalist behaviour is to be designated irrational, and thus relegate oneself to the periphery of society (9). The neo-liberal city’s enforcement of particular spatial and temporal modalities that align with the logic of purpose, order, and productivity is antagonistic to wandering. The fugue state, then, can rupture the restrictive logic of capitalism’s signifying chains through regaining forcibly expurgated ideas and memories. The walk around the M25 has an unreason to it: the perversity of wandering a thoroughfare designed for cars. In another, oft-quoted passage from Lights Out, Sinclair proposes another avatar of the flâneur:The concept of “strolling”, aimless urban wandering […] had been superseded. We had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent—sharp-eyed and unsponsored. The stalker was our role model: purposed hiking, not dawdling, nor browsing. No time for the savouring of reflections in shop windows, admiration for Art Nouveau ironwork, attractive matchboxes rescued from the gutter. This was walking with a thesis. With a prey. […] The stalker is a stroller who sweats, a stroller who knows where he is going, but not why or how. (75)Not only has the flâneur evolved into something far more exacting and purposeful, but as we want to illuminate, the flâneur’s wandering has evolved into something more material than transforming urban experience and encounter into art or literature as Baudelaire described. In a recent interview, Sinclair stated: The walker exists in a long tradition, and, for me, it’s really vital to simply be out there every day—not only because it feels good, but because in doing it you contribute to the microclimate of the city. As you withdraw energy from the city, you are also giving energy back. People are noticing you. You’re doing something, you’re there, the species around you absorb your presence into it, and you become part of this animate entity called the city. (Sinclair quoted in O'Connell)Sinclair’s acknowledgement that he is acting upon the city through his wandering is also an acknowledgement of a material, grounded interplay between what Jonathan Raban has called the “soft” and the “hard” city: “The city as we might imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture” (quoted in Manley 6). Readers and critics may gravitate to the soft city of Sinclair, but as Donald puts it, “The challenge is to draw the connections between place, archive, and imagination, not only by tracing those links in literary representations of London, but also by observing and describing the social, cultural, and subjective functions of London literature and London imagery” (in Manley, 262).Sinclair’s most recent longform book, The Last London (2017), is bracketed at both beginning and end with the words from the diarist of the Great Fire of 1666, John Evelyn: “London was, but is no more.” Sinclair’s evocation of the disaster that razed seventeenth-century London is a declaration that twenty-first century London, too, has been destroyed. This time by an unsavoury crew of gentrifiers, property developers, politicians, hyper-affluent transplants, and the creative classes. Writers are a sub-category of this latter group. Ambivalence and complicity are always there for Sinclair. On the one hand, his wanderings have attributed cultural value to previously overlooked aspects of London by the very virtue of writing about them. On the other hand, Sinclair argues that the value of these parts of the city hinges on their neglect by the dominant culture, which, of course, is no longer possible when his writing illuminates them. Certainly, wandering the city excavating the secret histories of cities has acquired an elevated cultural currency since Sinclair started writing. In making the East End “so gothically juicy”, Sinclair inaugurated a stream of new imaginings from “young acolyte psychogeographers” (McKay). Moreover, McKay points out that “Sinclair once wryly noted that anywhere he ‘nominated’ soon became an estate agent vision of luxury lifestyle”.Iain Sinclair’s London wanderings, then, call for a recognition that is more-than-literary. They are what we have referred to elsewhere as “worldly texts” (Potter and Seale, forthcoming), texts that have more-than-literary effects and instead are materially entangled in generating transformative conditions of place. Our understanding sits alongside the insights of literary geography, especially Sheila Hones’s concept of the text as a “spatial event”. In this reckoning, texts are spatio-temporal happenings that are neither singular nor have one clear “moment” of emergence. Rather, texts come into being across time and space, and in this sense can be understood as assemblages that include geographical locations, material contexts, and networks of production and reception. Literary effects are materially, collaboratively, and spatially generated in the world and have “territorial consequences”, as Jon Anderson puts it (127). Sinclair’s writings, we contend, can be seen as materialising versions of place that operate outside the assemblage of “literary” production and realise spatial and socio-economic consequence.Sinclair’s work does more than mimetically reproduce a “lost” London, or angrily write against the grain of neo-liberal gentrification. It is, in a sense, a geographic constituent that cannot be disaggregated from the contemporary dynamics of the privileges and exclusions of city. This speaks to the author’s ambivalence about his role as a central figure in London writing. For example, it has been noted that Sinclair is “aware of the charge that he’s been responsible as anyone for the fetishization of London’s decrepitude, contributing to an aesthetic of urban decay that is now ubiquitous” (Day). Walking the East End in what he has claimed to be his “last” London book (2017), Sinclair is horrified by the prevalence of what he calls “poverty chic” at the erstwhile Spitalfields Market: a boutique called “Urban Decay” is selling high-end lipsticks with an optional eye makeover. Next door is the “Brokedown Palace […] offering expensive Patagonia sweaters and pretty colourful rucksacks.” Ironically, the aesthetics of decline and ruin that Sinclair has actively brought to public notice over the last thirty years are contributing to this urban renewal. It could also be argued that Sinclair’s wandering is guilty of “the violence of spokesmanship”, which sublimates the voices of others (Weston 274), and is surely no longer the voice of the wanderer as marginalised outsider. When textual actors become networked with place, there can be extra-textual consequences, such as Sinclair’s implication in the making of place in a globalised and gentrified London. It shifts understanding of Sinclair’s wandering from representational and hermeneutic interpretation towards materialism: from what wandering means to what wandering does. From this perspective, Sinclair’s wandering and writing does not end with the covers of his books. The multiple ontologies of Sinclair’s worldly texts expand and proliferate through the plurality of composing relations, which, in turn, produce continuous and diverse iterations in an actor-network with place in London. Sinclair’s wanderings produce an ongoing archive of the urban that continues to iteratively make place, through multiple texts and narrative engagements, including novels, non-fiction accounts, journalism, interviews, intermedia collaborations, and assembling with the texts of others—from the many other London authors to whom Sinclair refers, to the tour guides who lead Time Out walking tours of “Sinclair’s London”. Place in contemporary London therefore assembles across and through an actor-network in which Sinclair’s wandering participates. Ultimately, Sinclair’s wandering and placemaking affirm Manley’s statement that “the urban environment in which (and in response to which) so much of English literature has been written has itself been constructed in many respects by its representation in that literature—by the ideas, images, and styles created by writers who have experienced or inhabited it” (2).ReferencesAnderson, Jon. “Towards an Assemblage Approach to Literary Geography.” Literary Geographies 1.2 (2015): 120–137.Atkins, Marc and Iain Sinclair. Liquid City. London: Reaktion, 1999.Baker, Brian. Iain Sinclair. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne. London and New York: Phaidon, 1995.Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Ed. Rolf Tiedmann. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002.Bond, Robert. Iain Sinclair. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2005.Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.Chambers, Russ. Loiterature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2005.Day, Jon. “The Last London by Iain Sinclair Review—an Elegy for a City Now Lost.” The Guardian 27 Sep. 2017. 7 July 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/27/last-london-iain-sinclair-review>.Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” Situationist International Anthology. Trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.———. “Détournement as Negation and Prelude.” Situationist International Anthology. Trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.Dirda, Michael. “Modern Life, as Seen by a Writer without a Smart Phone.” The Washington Post 17 Jan. 2018. 4 July 2018 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/modern-life-as-seen-by-an-artist-without-a-phone/2018/01/17/6d0b779c-fb07-11e7-8f66-2df0b94bb98a_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9333f36c6212>.Hones, Sheila. “Text as It Happens: Literary Geography.” Geography Compass 2.5 (2008): 301–1307.Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.Kerr, Joe. “The Habit of Hackney: Joe Kerr on Iain Sinclair.” Architects’ Journal 11 Mar. 2009. 8 July 2017 <https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/home/the-habit-of-hackney-joe-kerr-on-iain-sinclair/1995066.article>.Manley, Lawrence, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.McKay, Sinclair. “Is It Time for All Lovers of London to Pack up?” The Spectator 2 Sep. 2017. 6 July 2018 <https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/is-it-time-for-all-lovers-of-london-to-pack-up/>.O’Connell, Teresa. “Iain Sinclair: Walking Is a Democracy.” Guernica 16 Nov. 2017. 7 July 2018 <https://www.guernicamag.com/iain-sinclair-walking-democracy/>.Perril, Simon. “A Cartography of Absence: The Work of Iain Sinclair.” Comparative Criticism 19 (1997): 309–339.Potter, Emily, and Kirsten Seale. “The Worldly Text and the Production of More-than-Literary Place: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Melbourne’s ‘Inner North’”. Cultural Geographies (forthcoming 2019).Seale, Kirsten. “‘Eye-Swiping’ London: Iain Sinclair, Photography and the Flâneur.” Literary London 3.2 (2005).———. “Iain Sinclair’s Archive.” Sydney Review of Books. 10 Sep. 2018. 12 July 2019 <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/sinclair-last-london/>.Sinclair, Iain. Dining on Stones, or, The Middle Ground. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004.———. Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta, 1997.———. London Orbital. London: Penguin, 2003.———. The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City. London: Oneworld Publications, 2017.Weston, Daniel. “‘Against the Grand Project’: Iain Sinclair’s Local London.” Contemporary Literature 56.2 (2015): 255–280. Wolfreys, Julian. Writing London: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality Volume 2. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.