Finding Time for the Old Stone Age explores a century of colourful debate over the age of our earliest ancestors. In the mid nineteenth century curious stone implements were found alongside the bones of extinct animals. Humans were evidently more ancient than had been supposed - but just how old were they? There were several clocks for Stone-Age time, and it would prove difficult to synchronize them. Conflicting timescales were drawn from the fields of geology, palaeontology, anthropology, and archaeology. Anne (...) O'Connor draws on a wealth of lively, personal correspondence to explain the nature of these arguments. The trail leads from Britain to Continental Europe, Africa, and Asia, and extends beyond the world of professors, museum keepers, and officers of the Geological Survey: wine sellers, diamond merchants, papermakers, and clerks also proposed timescales for the Palaeolithic. This book brings their stories to light for the first time - stories that offer an intriguing insight into how knowledge was built up about the ancient British past. (shrink)

Abstract:Nicholas Winding Refn regularly appears to offer men as his audience's main point of identification. Yet these men are predominantly transgressive characters who frequently, if not constantly, frustrate spectator-identification and consequently linger on the periphery of cinematic paradigms. In three stages, this article analyses how Refn's violent male characters affect spectatorship. First, it considers the unstable subject mechanisms for spectator-identification afforded by classical Hollywood cinema. Second, it examines Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytical theorization of the abject and outlines the relevance of her (...) concepts to Refn's narratives. Third, it conducts a close textual analysis of Bronson (2008) and Drive (2011), arguing that the disregard for symbolic order demonstrated by Refn's male protagonists and their concomitant embrace of the death drive inhibit spectator-identification. This analysis ultimately aims to demonstrate the import of Kristeva's theories to a more comprehensive understanding of the abject's complex relationship to Refn's œuvre and to spectator-identification in cinema. (shrink)

Ideas about education and its power to transform people’s intellectual, social, political, and personal lives were central to Enlightenment thought. They were also central to the Enlightenment belief that new ways of thinking engendered new ways of living (and vice versa). Taken together, these points placed education at the heart of early modern debates over the constitution of society, the organization and administration of the polity, the nature and purpose of civil society, and the relations that govern everyday life. To (...) understand this view of education and the Enlightenment debates to which it gave rise, this essay highlights the role of skepticism and uncertainty in Enlightenment thought, the philosophes’ interest in education as an instrument of moral and social improvement, and their commitment to the idea that both individual and collective progress stemmed from critical forms of social intercourse. As a result, we see that the Enlightenment’s educational legacy is not a particular platform or pedagogy, but an ongoing experiment in how the critical and collective pursuit of useful knowledge might reform or remake human society. (shrink)

Finding Time for the Old Stone Age explores a century of colourful debate over the age of our earliest ancestors. In the mid nineteenth century curious stone implements were found alongside the bones of extinct animals. Humans were evidently more ancient than had been supposed - but just how old were they? There were several clocks for Stone-Age time, and it would prove difficult to synchronize them. Conflicting timescales were drawn from the fields of geology, palaeontology, anthropology, and archaeology. Anne (...) O'Connor draws on a wealth of lively, personal correspondence to explain the nature of these arguments. The trail leads from Britain to Continental Europe, Africa, and Asia, and extends beyond the world of professors, museum keepers, and officers of the Geological Survey: wine sellers, diamond merchants, papermakers, and clerks also proposed timescales for the Palaeolithic. This book brings their stories to light for the first time - stories that offer an intriguing insight into how knowledge was built up about the ancient British past. (shrink)