This paper explains how H. G. Wells's modern cosmopolitan imaginary, as evidenced in A Modern... more This paper explains how H. G. Wells's modern cosmopolitan imaginary, as evidenced in A Modern Utopia, translates Victorian politics of demos and urbanization discourse onto the global space at the turn of the twentieth century to bring into being a mutual reinforcement of urban governance and imagined globalism. I first briefly cover the historical contexts of Victorian urbanization to situate the making of H. G. Wells's utopia of a world state in the history at the turn of the century and then analyze the plot structure in terms of Friedrich Schiller's aesthetic theory. The creative attempts of H. G. Wells's utopian writing, linking two major historical contexts of his day, liberal governance and global trading, give expression to a cosmopolitan imaginary of classical globalization. London as an imagined city in the Wellsian utopia substantiates what the Great Exhibition of 1851 stands for, the vision of light that takes imperialism for granted and celebrates in the urban locale concentration of commodities brought forth by global trading. The significance of this historical situating of cosmopolitan imaginary is then to think of the city as a persistently dominant form of contemporary global visions.
Nineteenth Century Literature in English, Aug 1, 2011
This paper discusses the relationship of capital, things, and selfimprovement in Charles Dickens’... more This paper discusses the relationship of capital, things, and selfimprovement in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860-1) and focuses on the character of Abel Magwitch to delineate a positive attitude toward the possession of capital shown in the novel. Dickens reproduces the chill-and-kill culture in the early 19th century brought on by the punitive financial prohibition measures of capital punishment, long-term imprisonment or transportation out to colonies, while highlighting the optimistic anticipation of profit making by personal participation in capital investment in the 1850s after the financial reforms. Meanwhile, Dickens also avoids a swing to a total embrace of things without any assertion of a person’s agency. Great Expectations offers readers a transit for entering a status of coexistence with things, from an unformulated fear of owning things to techniques of detaching the self from the dominance of things over subjectivities. By this study I wish to contribute to the understanding of high-Victorian novels as complex reactions to the classical idea of homo oeconomicus, which underpins the political economy initiated by Adam Smith and others.
This essay explicates Édouard Glissant’s aesthetics of opacity in terms of its formation and sign... more This essay explicates Édouard Glissant’s aesthetics of opacity in terms of its formation and significance. This theory comes into form in the historical condition of colonial alterity. In The Poetics of Relation (originally published in French in 1990), Glissant extrapolates opacity as the fundamental of aesthetics from such linguistic activities as creole languages and improvised stories found in the Caribbean islands. More than a postcolonial defense of identity alterity, opacity denotes the linguistic expression of material alterity. It means an involuntary flourishing of linguistically enhanced dynamic of exchange, connection, and making in the landscapes of compelling affordances. Such languages cannot be reduced to texts because they are derived from the inevitably alien ground called "the other of Thought,” or a recognition and practice of radical difference. The significance of the aesthetics of opacity lies in that, Glissant asserts, humans can linguistically express the engagement with material ecologies while avoiding the authoritative domination of reason.
This paper discusses the relationship of capital, things, and selfimprovement in Charles Dickens’... more This paper discusses the relationship of capital, things, and selfimprovement in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860-1) and focuses on the character of Abel Magwitch to delineate a positive attitude toward the possession of capital shown in the novel. Dickens reproduces the chill-and-kill culture in the early 19th century brought on by the punitive financial prohibition measures of capital punishment, long-term imprisonment or transportation out to colonies, while highlighting the optimistic anticipation of profit making by personal participation in capital investment in the 1850s after the financial reforms. Meanwhile, Dickens also avoids a swing to a total embrace of things without any assertion of a person’s agency. Great Expectations offers readers a transit for entering a status of coexistence with things, from an unformulated fear of owning things to techniques of detaching the self from the dominance of things over subjectivities. By this study I wish to contribute to t...
This paper explains how H. G. Wells's modern cosmopolitan imaginary, as evidenced in A Modern... more This paper explains how H. G. Wells's modern cosmopolitan imaginary, as evidenced in A Modern Utopia, translates Victorian politics of demos and urbanization discourse onto the global space at the turn of the twentieth century to bring into being a mutual reinforcement of urban governance and imagined globalism. I first briefly cover the historical contexts of Victorian urbanization to situate the making of H. G. Wells's utopia of a world state in the history at the turn of the century and then analyze the plot structure in terms of Friedrich Schiller's aesthetic theory. The creative attempts of H. G. Wells's utopian writing, linking two major historical contexts of his day, liberal governance and global trading, give expression to a cosmopolitan imaginary of classical globalization. London as an imagined city in the Wellsian utopia substantiates what the Great Exhibition of 1851 stands for, the vision of light that takes imperialism for granted and celebrates in the...
Positions East Asia Cultures Critique, Oct 2, 2014
In this essay we argue that stories of rich merchants enable us to see new forms of neoliberal su... more In this essay we argue that stories of rich merchants enable us to see new forms of neoliberal subject imaginary. They serve to teach the public about how to become a profit- seeking person, given that previously formal education did not prepare citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to pursue profit. These popular materials invite the public to reconceptualize the relationship between individuals and society and in this sense constitute a significant cultural strategy for governing the population. Tracing the Chinese variations of the global logic of neoliberal economic man and cultural governance, we intend to read the merchant stories as instances of “glocalization” of neoliberal economic man and demonstrate that the “translation” of the global logic of capitalism to suit local conditions is by no means a neat and tidy task. Our analysis proceeds in two parts. The first section discusses Michel Foucault’s concept of human capital and Ludwig von Mises’s theory of human action to define neoliberal economic man and then relates these concepts to the formation of a variety of rich- merchant stories. The second section delves into the question of how biographies of the new rich convey, in concrete terms, the practices of cultural governance and reshape agents in the model of the neoliberal economic man, and how these rich- merchant stories prove paradigmatic for entrepreneurs- to- be.
This paper explains how H. G. Wells's modern cosmopolitan imaginary, as evidenced in A Modern... more This paper explains how H. G. Wells's modern cosmopolitan imaginary, as evidenced in A Modern Utopia, translates Victorian politics of demos and urbanization discourse onto the global space at the turn of the twentieth century to bring into being a mutual reinforcement of urban governance and imagined globalism. I first briefly cover the historical contexts of Victorian urbanization to situate the making of H. G. Wells's utopia of a world state in the history at the turn of the century and then analyze the plot structure in terms of Friedrich Schiller's aesthetic theory. The creative attempts of H. G. Wells's utopian writing, linking two major historical contexts of his day, liberal governance and global trading, give expression to a cosmopolitan imaginary of classical globalization. London as an imagined city in the Wellsian utopia substantiates what the Great Exhibition of 1851 stands for, the vision of light that takes imperialism for granted and celebrates in the urban locale concentration of commodities brought forth by global trading. The significance of this historical situating of cosmopolitan imaginary is then to think of the city as a persistently dominant form of contemporary global visions.
Nineteenth Century Literature in English, Aug 1, 2011
This paper discusses the relationship of capital, things, and selfimprovement in Charles Dickens’... more This paper discusses the relationship of capital, things, and selfimprovement in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860-1) and focuses on the character of Abel Magwitch to delineate a positive attitude toward the possession of capital shown in the novel. Dickens reproduces the chill-and-kill culture in the early 19th century brought on by the punitive financial prohibition measures of capital punishment, long-term imprisonment or transportation out to colonies, while highlighting the optimistic anticipation of profit making by personal participation in capital investment in the 1850s after the financial reforms. Meanwhile, Dickens also avoids a swing to a total embrace of things without any assertion of a person’s agency. Great Expectations offers readers a transit for entering a status of coexistence with things, from an unformulated fear of owning things to techniques of detaching the self from the dominance of things over subjectivities. By this study I wish to contribute to the understanding of high-Victorian novels as complex reactions to the classical idea of homo oeconomicus, which underpins the political economy initiated by Adam Smith and others.
This essay explicates Édouard Glissant’s aesthetics of opacity in terms of its formation and sign... more This essay explicates Édouard Glissant’s aesthetics of opacity in terms of its formation and significance. This theory comes into form in the historical condition of colonial alterity. In The Poetics of Relation (originally published in French in 1990), Glissant extrapolates opacity as the fundamental of aesthetics from such linguistic activities as creole languages and improvised stories found in the Caribbean islands. More than a postcolonial defense of identity alterity, opacity denotes the linguistic expression of material alterity. It means an involuntary flourishing of linguistically enhanced dynamic of exchange, connection, and making in the landscapes of compelling affordances. Such languages cannot be reduced to texts because they are derived from the inevitably alien ground called "the other of Thought,” or a recognition and practice of radical difference. The significance of the aesthetics of opacity lies in that, Glissant asserts, humans can linguistically express the engagement with material ecologies while avoiding the authoritative domination of reason.
This paper discusses the relationship of capital, things, and selfimprovement in Charles Dickens’... more This paper discusses the relationship of capital, things, and selfimprovement in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860-1) and focuses on the character of Abel Magwitch to delineate a positive attitude toward the possession of capital shown in the novel. Dickens reproduces the chill-and-kill culture in the early 19th century brought on by the punitive financial prohibition measures of capital punishment, long-term imprisonment or transportation out to colonies, while highlighting the optimistic anticipation of profit making by personal participation in capital investment in the 1850s after the financial reforms. Meanwhile, Dickens also avoids a swing to a total embrace of things without any assertion of a person’s agency. Great Expectations offers readers a transit for entering a status of coexistence with things, from an unformulated fear of owning things to techniques of detaching the self from the dominance of things over subjectivities. By this study I wish to contribute to t...
This paper explains how H. G. Wells's modern cosmopolitan imaginary, as evidenced in A Modern... more This paper explains how H. G. Wells's modern cosmopolitan imaginary, as evidenced in A Modern Utopia, translates Victorian politics of demos and urbanization discourse onto the global space at the turn of the twentieth century to bring into being a mutual reinforcement of urban governance and imagined globalism. I first briefly cover the historical contexts of Victorian urbanization to situate the making of H. G. Wells's utopia of a world state in the history at the turn of the century and then analyze the plot structure in terms of Friedrich Schiller's aesthetic theory. The creative attempts of H. G. Wells's utopian writing, linking two major historical contexts of his day, liberal governance and global trading, give expression to a cosmopolitan imaginary of classical globalization. London as an imagined city in the Wellsian utopia substantiates what the Great Exhibition of 1851 stands for, the vision of light that takes imperialism for granted and celebrates in the...
Positions East Asia Cultures Critique, Oct 2, 2014
In this essay we argue that stories of rich merchants enable us to see new forms of neoliberal su... more In this essay we argue that stories of rich merchants enable us to see new forms of neoliberal subject imaginary. They serve to teach the public about how to become a profit- seeking person, given that previously formal education did not prepare citizens of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to pursue profit. These popular materials invite the public to reconceptualize the relationship between individuals and society and in this sense constitute a significant cultural strategy for governing the population. Tracing the Chinese variations of the global logic of neoliberal economic man and cultural governance, we intend to read the merchant stories as instances of “glocalization” of neoliberal economic man and demonstrate that the “translation” of the global logic of capitalism to suit local conditions is by no means a neat and tidy task. Our analysis proceeds in two parts. The first section discusses Michel Foucault’s concept of human capital and Ludwig von Mises’s theory of human action to define neoliberal economic man and then relates these concepts to the formation of a variety of rich- merchant stories. The second section delves into the question of how biographies of the new rich convey, in concrete terms, the practices of cultural governance and reshape agents in the model of the neoliberal economic man, and how these rich- merchant stories prove paradigmatic for entrepreneurs- to- be.
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