Taking the culturally resonant motif of the descent to the underworld as his guiding thread, David L. Pike traces the interplay between myth and history in medieval and modernist literature. Passage through Hell suggests new approaches to the practice of comparative literature, and a possible escape from the current morass of competing critical schools and ideologies. Pike's readings of Louis Ferdinand Céline and Walter Benjamin reveal the tensions at work in the modern appropriation of structures derived from ancient and medieval descents. His book shows how these structures were redefined in modernism and persist in contemporary critical practice. In order to recover the historical corpus of modernism, he asserts, it is necessary to acknowledge the attraction that medieval forms and motifs held for modernist literature and theory. By pairing the writings of the postwar German dramatist and novelist Peter Weiss with Dante's Commedia, and Christine de Pizan with Virginia Woolf, Pike argues for a new level of complexity in the relation between medieval and modern poetics. Pike's supple and persuasive reading of the Commedia resituates that text within the contradictions of medieval tradition. He contends that the Dantean allegory of conversion, altered to suit the exigencies of modernism, maintains its hold over current literature and theory. The postwar writers Pike treats—Weiss, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott—exemplify alternate strategies for negotiating the legacy of modernism. The passage through hell emerges as a way of disentangling images of the past from their interpretation in the present.
In Metropolis on the Styx,David L. Pike considers how underground spaces and their many myths have organized ways of seeing, thinking about, and living in the modern city. Expanding on the cultural history of underground construction in his acclaimed previous book, Subterranean Cities, Pike details the emergence of a vertical city in the imagination of nineteenth-century Paris and London, a city overseen by hosts of devils and undermined by subterranean villains, a city whose ground level was replete with passages between above and below. Metropolis on the Styx brings together a rich variety of visual and written sources ranging from pulp mysteries and movie serials to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the novels of Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Elinor Glyn to the broadsheets and ephemera of everyday urban life. From these materials, Pike conjures a working theory of modern underground space that explains why our notions about urban environments remain essentially nineteenth-century in character, even though cities themselves have since changed almost beyond recognition.Highly original in subject matter, methodology, and conclusions, Metropolis on the Styx synthesizes a number of critical approaches, periods of study, and disciplines in the analysis of a single category of space—the underground. Pike studies the built environments and the textual and visual ephemera (including little-known or unknown archival material) of Paris, London, and other cities in conjunction with canonical modern literature and art. This book integrates a rich visual component—photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined subterranean spaces—into the fabric of the argument.
In Metropolis on the Styx,David L. Pike considers how underground spaces and their many myths have organized ways of seeing, thinking about, and living in the modern city. Expanding on the cultural history of underground construction in his acclaimed previous book, Subterranean Cities, Pike details the emergence of a vertical city in the imagination of nineteenth-century Paris and London, a city overseen by hosts of devils and undermined by subterranean villains, a city whose ground level was replete with passages between above and below. Metropolis on the Styx brings together a rich variety of visual and written sources ranging from pulp mysteries and movie serials to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the novels of Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Elinor Glyn to the broadsheets and ephemera of everyday urban life. From these materials, Pike conjures a working theory of modern underground space that explains why our notions about urban environments remain essentially nineteenth-century in character, even though cities themselves have since changed almost beyond recognition.Highly original in subject matter, methodology, and conclusions, Metropolis on the Styx synthesizes a number of critical approaches, periods of study, and disciplines in the analysis of a single category of space—the underground. Pike studies the built environments and the textual and visual ephemera (including little-known or unknown archival material) of Paris, London, and other cities in conjunction with canonical modern literature and art. This book integrates a rich visual component—photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined subterranean spaces—into the fabric of the argument.
The underground has been a dominant image of modern life since the late eighteenth century. A site of crisis, fascination, and hidden truth, the underground is a space at once more immediate and more threatening than the ordinary world above. In Subterranean Cities, David L. Pike explores the representation of underground space in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period during which technology and heavy industry transformed urban life.The metropolis had long been considered a moral underworld of iniquity and dissolution. As the complex drainage systems, underground railways, utility tunnels, and storage vaults of the modern cityscape superseded the countryside of caverns and mines as the principal location of actual subterranean spaces, ancient and modern converged in a mythic space that was nevertheless rooted in the everyday life of the contemporary city. Writers and artists from Felix Nadar and Charles Baudelaire to Charles Dickens and Alice Meynell, Gustave Doré and Victor Hugo, George Gissing and Emile Zola, and Jules Verne and H. G. Wells integrated images of the urban underworld into their portrayals of the anatomy of modern society. Illustrated with photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined urban spaces, Subterranean Cities documents the emergence of a novel space in the subterranean obsessions and anxieties within nineteenth-century urban culture. Chapters on the subways, sewers, and cemeteries of Paris and London provide a detailed analysis of these competing centers of urban modernity. A concluding chapter considers the enduring influence of these spaces on urban culture at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades studies the two periods in which Americans were actively encouraged to excavate their own backyards while governments the world over exhausted their budgets on fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs. The dreams and nightmares inspired by the spectre of nuclear destruction were expressed in images and forms from comics, movies, and pulp paperbacks to policy documents, protest movements, and survivalist tracts. Illustrated with photographs, artwork, and movie and television stills of real and imagined fallout shelters and other bunker fantasies, award-winning author David L. Pike's continues his decades-long exploration of the meanings of modern undergrounds. Ranging widely across disciplines, this volume finds unexpected connections between cultural icons and forgotten texts, plumbs the bunker's stratifications of class, region, race, and gender, and traces the often unrecognized through-lines leading from the 1960s and the less-studied 1980s into the present. Although the Cold War ended over 30 years ago, its legacy looms large in anxieties around security, borders, and all manners of imminent apocalypse. Treating the bunker in its concrete presence and in its flightiest fantasies while attending equally to its uniquely American desires and pathologies and to its global impact, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s proposes a new way to understand the outsized afterlife of the bunkered decades.
Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades studies the two periods in which Americans were actively encouraged to excavate their own backyards while governments the world over exhausted their budgets on fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs. The dreams and nightmares inspired by the spectre of nuclear destruction were expressed in images and forms from comics, movies, and pulp paperbacks to policy documents, protest movements, and survivalist tracts. Illustrated with photographs, artwork, and movie and television stills of real and imagined fallout shelters and other bunker fantasies, award-winning author David L. Pike's continues his decades-long exploration of the meanings of modern undergrounds. Ranging widely across disciplines, this volume finds unexpected connections between cultural icons and forgotten texts, plumbs the bunker's stratifications of class, region, race, and gender, and traces the often unrecognized through-lines leading from the 1960s and the less-studied 1980s into the present. Although the Cold War ended over 30 years ago, its legacy looms large in anxieties around security, borders, and all manners of imminent apocalypse. Treating the bunker in its concrete presence and in its flightiest fantasies while attending equally to its uniquely American desires and pathologies and to its global impact, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s proposes a new way to understand the outsized afterlife of the bunkered decades.
Taking the culturally resonant motif of the descent to the underworld as his guiding thread, David L. Pike traces the interplay between myth and history in medieval and modernist literature. Passage through Hell suggests new approaches to the practice of comparative literature, and a possible escape from the current morass of competing critical schools and ideologies. Pike's readings of Louis Ferdinand Céline and Walter Benjamin reveal the tensions at work in the modern appropriation of structures derived from ancient and medieval descents. His book shows how these structures were redefined in modernism and persist in contemporary critical practice. In order to recover the historical corpus of modernism, he asserts, it is necessary to acknowledge the attraction that medieval forms and motifs held for modernist literature and theory. By pairing the writings of the postwar German dramatist and novelist Peter Weiss with Dante's Commedia, and Christine de Pizan with Virginia Woolf, Pike argues for a new level of complexity in the relation between medieval and modern poetics. Pike's supple and persuasive reading of the Commedia resituates that text within the contradictions of medieval tradition. He contends that the Dantean allegory of conversion, altered to suit the exigencies of modernism, maintains its hold over current literature and theory. The postwar writers Pike treats—Weiss, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott—exemplify alternate strategies for negotiating the legacy of modernism. The passage through hell emerges as a way of disentangling images of the past from their interpretation in the present.
After the End argues that the cultural imaginaries and practices of the Cold War continue to deeply shape the present in profound but largely unnoticed ways across the global North and in the global South. The argument draws examples from literature and literary criticism, film, music, the historical and social scientific record and past and present physical sites to consider the bunker as a material form, an image and as a fantasy that took shape in the global North in the 1960s and that spread globally into the twenty-first century. After the End reminds us not only that most of the world’s peoples have lived with or died from apocalyptic conditions for centuries, but that the Cold War imaginaries that grew from and fed those conditions, continue to survive as well.
Corruption Plots illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Malini Ranganathan, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. Corruption Plots demonstrates how corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of unequal spatial change and used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, the authors reveal the ethical, spatial, and political stakes of storytelling and how vital it is to examine the corruption plot in all its contradictions.
Award-winning author David L. Pike offers a unique focus on the crucial quarter-century in Canadian filmmaking when the industry became a viable force on the international stage. Pike provides a lively, personal, and accessible history of the most influential filmmakers and movements of both Anglo-Canadian and Quebecois cinema, from popular movies to art film and everything in between. Along with in-depth studies of key directors, including David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema and Denys Arcand, Jean-Claude Lauzon, Robert Lepage, Léa Pool, Atom Egoyan, and Guy Maddin, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s reflects on major themes and genres and explores the regional and cultural diversity of the period. Pike positions Canadian filmmaking at the frontlines of a profound cinematic transformation in the age of global media and presents fresh perspectives on both its local and international contexts. Making a significant advance in the study of the film industry of the period, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s is also an ideal text for students, researchers, and Canadian film enthusiasts.
Award-winning author David L. Pike offers a unique focus on the crucial quarter-century in Canadian filmmaking when the industry became a viable force on the international stage. Pike provides a lively, personal, and accessible history of the most influential filmmakers and movements of both Anglo-Canadian and Quebecois cinema, from popular movies to art film and everything in between. Along with in-depth studies of key directors, including David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema and Denys Arcand, Jean-Claude Lauzon, Robert Lepage, Léa Pool, Atom Egoyan, and Guy Maddin, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s reflects on major themes and genres and explores the regional and cultural diversity of the period. Pike positions Canadian filmmaking at the frontlines of a profound cinematic transformation in the age of global media and presents fresh perspectives on both its local and international contexts. Making a significant advance in the study of the film industry of the period, Canadian Cinema since the 1980s is also an ideal text for students, researchers, and Canadian film enthusiasts.
At an early age, I discovered that I was not a farmer, and thanks to my father's insistence, I discovered the Merchant Marine and found a home there. Unfortunately, that was short-lived.—the war ended, and it was back to the farm? No, that was not for me! The Army sounded fine for a lost soul, but it got me into another war where I rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant as I toured Europe until honorably discharged. My military service helped me with twenty-five years of gainful employment and experience in the rocket and space business until retirement and dreaming of publishing this book in later years that have finally come. To those who read this and didn't finish schooling, go back, or look at those ten fingers and say, "Teach me what I need to know to succeed
We met because we both share the same views of language. Language is a living organism, produced by neural mechanisms relating in large numbers as a society. Language exists between minds, as a way of communicating between them, not as an autonomous process. The logical 'rules' seem to us an epiphe nomena ·of the neural mechanism, rather than an essential component in language. This view of language has been advocated by an increasing number of workers, as the view that language is simply a collection of logical rules has had less and less success. People like Yorick Wilks have been able to show in paper after paper that almost any rule which can be devised can be shown to have exceptions. The meaning does not lie in the rules. David Powers is a teacher of computer science. Christopher Turk, like many workers who have come into the field of AI (Artificial Intelligence) was originally trained in literature. He moved into linguistics, and then into computational linguistics. In 1983 he took a sabbatical in Roger Shank's AI project in the Computer Science Department at Yale University. Like an earlier visitor to the project, John Searle from California, Christopher Turk was increasingly uneasy at the view of language which was used at Yale.
Explore the spiritual dimensions of aging through science, theory, and practice! During the later years of life, many people devote energy to a process of spiritual awakening and self-discovery. Yet their family, friends, clergy, and the helping professionals who work with them are not always prepared to understand or deal with the spiritual concerns of their clients. Aging and Spirituality provides a unique, far-reaching overview of this long-neglected field. Divided into four independent but interwoven sections, this landmark book covers the spiritual realm with scientific rigor and deep human understanding. Aging and Spirituality comprehensively surveys the issues of spirituality, from the groundwork of basic definitions to detailed assessments of the role spirituality plays in the lives of the elderly and suggested directions for further research. This book's unique approach combines scholarly research and practical nuts-and-bolts suggestions for service delivery. By drawing from many disciplines and professions, it offers fresh perspectives to even those practitioners already familiar with the most effective spiritual techniques their own field can offer. Aging and Spirituality answers such common questions as: What are the spiritual needs of people later in life? Is there any solid evidence that prayer changes things? How is spirituality related to physical and mental health? Does spirituality matter when people know they are dying? How can we measure spiritual wellness and assess the outcomes of activities intended to enhance it? Will attention to spirituality aggravate or alleviate the losses--of friends, family, health, youth--that so often occur during old age? Aging and Spirituality provides a much-needed resource for health care professionals, clergy, social workers, and counselors working with geriatric clients. By integrating spiritual issues into the theoretical framework of social gerontology, Aging and Spirituality will help you understand the scientific foundations, practical applications, and public policy implications of spirituality for older adults.
In London Underground, David Ashford sets out to chart one of the strangest—as well as most familiar—spaces in London: its famed underground rail system. Providing an account of the evolution of this archetypal modern environment, he sees the underground as the first space to complete the slow process of our estrangement from natural landscape. For Ashford, it is, as Marc Augé has called it, a nonplace, a way to traverse an invisible landscape through the medium of signs and maps. Surveying an impressive diversity of materials, from the Victorian triple-decker novel to modernist art, pop music, and graffiti, Ashford combines cultural history with spatial theory to tell a story of how people have attempted to make a home in the sometimes bizarre spaces of the modern world.
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