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Foreword to the first issue of Brief Encounters.

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Acknowledgements for the first issue of Brief Encounters.

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Nightcore is a previously academically unexamined music scene, which exists entirely online and operates as a unique micro-subculture within the broader context of internet-based electronic music. A scene born on the internet in the early 2000s, nightcore has recently experienced something of a surge in popularity, and now refers most broadly to hyper-fast dance music with pitched-up vocals, which is based around sped-up tracks lifted wholesale from mainstream pop, rock, and EDM, often, but not always, with additional original production. Nightcore is remarkable both for its DIY attitude to deskilling electronic production, lowering the barrier to entry for producers to a point of near-nonexistence, and for its internet-centric, yet profoundly social approach to track dissemination and community.

This article traces the history and present-day status of nightcore, providing brief multidisciplinary analyses of tracks and production styles from a musicological, feminist and accelerationist perspective, and examines, from a primarily observational ethnomusicological viewpoint, nightcore communities and live ‘shows’ which take place solely online and gear themselves towards listeners and producers from all over the world. Since this article represents the first piece of academic research into nightcore, it is by necessity broad in its scope. This article hopes to prompt further research and discussion both within the genre itself, and more generally around online musical communities and the work created within them. 

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What is the relationship that exists between film characters and film music and does this relationship affect the audience’s understanding of film narrative? In order to answer these questions, this article explores how the terms ‘diegetic’ and ‘non-diegetic’ have been defined, and summarises the alternative interpretations which have been proposed by musicologists to date. In addition, it considers a psychological survey conducted in 2013 by Matthew Spackman, Elizabeth Wakefield and Siu-Lan Tan, which tests how narrative is shaped by film music. Finally, this article focuses on the use of the Adagio (movement II), from Beethoven's piano sonata Op. 2 No. 3, in the film Byzantium to discuss how both its diegetic and its non-diegetic presentation of this sonata helps director Neil Jordan to articulate the complexity of the narrative that is unveiled as the film progresses.

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This article searches for the history of John Bradford’s mother’s prayer by asking how words reported to have been spoken in July 1555 came to be printed nearly thirty years later in Thomas Bentley's The Monument of Matrones. Through renewed analysis of TheMonument’s preface, the article considers the prayer in the context of how Bentley’s anthological practices enabled him to collect sufficient texts to oil the 1600 pages of his seven lamps for wise virgins. Thus, guided by Bentley’s own admission of how he found ‘woorthie paternes’ in ‘excellent and rare works’, the article recovers a previously unrecognised material history for the prayer, and consequently raises complex questions about the formation of authorial identities through the attribution of texts.

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What does the use of biblical scripture, viewed through the funeral monument’s material and spatial presence in the church building disclose about the role of the places for the dead in establishing and maintaining church practices and ritual during the formative years of the Reformation? Taking the lead from the tomb of early evangelical reformer Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk at Spilsby in Lincolnshire, this article examines the relationship between text, space and materiality in the formulation of a protestant rhetoric of congregational equality with its epicentre in the church nave. Tracing the texts and placements of commemorative structures, and their relationship to official as well as more radical protestant texts, including the Elizabethan Injunctions (1559), as well as the writing of John Dod (1615), this preliminary investigation explores the fertile relationship between object and text in the development of Protestant identities.

By applying recent archaeological scholarship into the role of ‘presencing’ mechanisms (Graves 2000, & Roffey, 2008) in the medieval and post-medieval church interior to the Willoughby monument in Spilsby’s north chancel, as well as two further examples of the tombs of protestant reformers, the notion of a protestant dismissal of the visual as a tool in devotion will be challenged. By introducing the central role of placement, the approach will destabilize the view that in the protestant church ‘the greatest visual impact came from words’ (MacCulloch, 1999, p. 159), and instead, place language into the wider architectural and spatial narratives of the church interior.

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This article makes the case that Seamus Heaney’s bog poems, in his collection North, represent the body in such a way as to evoke the sublime. Heaney's depicition of bodies presents them as a weird conflation of terror and beauty, which is, this article claims, his precise articulation of the sublime: one that is distinct from Edmund Burke’s theory. In recognition of the fact that much of the scholarly writing on North, thus far, has focused its attention on how these poems represent Heaney’s Irishness, his relationship to politics and the Troubles, his mythopoeic imagination, and so on, this article advances the critical discourse on his work, and moves the analysis towards feminist commentary and the affective dimension of the poems. In part the intention is to address an often reductive, historicist approach to reading texts, and the swift eagerness of literary critics to seize Heaney’s poems for their own political agendas. With this in mind, this article responds to recent feminist debates on Heaney, while arguing that Heaney’s sublime does not represent an ogre-like patriarchy, but rather remains respectful of its object, and works to resolve any seeming opposition to the category of the beautiful.

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This article responds to the accusation made by Lois McNay in The Misguided Search for the Political that much radical democratic theory is ‘socially weightless’ as a direct result of its turn towards an ontological understanding of the political. It argues that the social weightlessness identified in the work of the particular theorists McNay singles out for critique is not the result of the ontological approach per se. After briefly summarising McNay’s argument, Oliver Marchart’s ontology of political difference is used to defend the ‘search for the political’ against four aspects of McNay’s argument: the status of the ontological in post-foundational thought, the question of universality in relation to the political, the relationship between the social and the political, and that between indeterminacy and agency. Following this, the methodology of the disclosing critique of social suffering that McNay puts forward as an alternative to the ontological paradigm will be examined. This will be shown not only to be compatible with such a paradigm, but to be rooted in the very same parts of Heidegger’s philosophy. Moreover, her approach is found to enhance the ontological approach to the political by recovering its hermeneutical dimension, and in turn reconnecting hermeneutics to the question of the body. These are steps which, if further built upon, could add not only social, but also fleshly weight to ontological theories of the political, strengthening the critical potential of radical democracy.

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This article explores the representation of time in Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell Scarlet Tracings and J. G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company and assesses the literary critical potentials of Michel Serres’s concept of folded temporality as a way of approaching them. After briefly introducing the concept of folded time the article shows that the literary texts describe localities at odds with a Kantian linear understanding of time. The article then assesses these ruptured temporalities against Serres’s concept of time through an exploration of the specific functions assigned to intertextuality by the two authors. The authors’ representations of visionary subjectivities are shown to interact with linear and trans-historical temporalities that problematise the use of Serres as a critical framework. Ultimately, the article demonstrates that Michel Serres’s conception of folded time is valuable as a framework for understanding the representation of time in literature. However, its failure to fully address and explain all of the temporal machinations of the two novels demands the image of folded time be subordinated as a tool for existent critical fields, rather than be used to constitute a radical new model of time in literature. 

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Linguistic theory has been preoccupied since midway through the twentieth century with the search for universals of language. However, more recently there has been increasing attention across the different disciplines that contribute to research in language to variation and difference. This goes together with a more recent focus on culture and language, approached through interdisciplinary research methods, including field research. In this article the authors report the results of a survey they conducted with the assistance of indigenous teachers about the counting term (number) systems of their native Amazonian languages. All the teachers were indigenous people from different communities living in the State of Rondônia, Brazil. This survey of twenty-three languages, belonging to seven different language families, confirms the observation that small counting term systems are a general feature of indigenous Amazonian languages. This article identifies two general features of counting term systems in the languages of Rondônia: a restricted number (less than five) of lexicalisations of number, and the productive combinatorial use of these terms to refer to larger quantities. It suggests that this is evidence of a way of thinking about and practicing counting that is shared across a cultural area. However, this generalization goes together with a high degree of of diversity in the specific patterns of lexicalisation and combination. 

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Many people have noted a suggestive parallel between the abstract paintings of Piet Mondrian and the design of metro maps such as Henry Beck’s map of the London Underground. Is this just a superficial similarity or is there some more substantive point of connection? This article speculates that the ‘dynamic equilibrium’, which gave Mondrian’s mature pictures their inimitable psychological force, could also be at work in the most iconic metro maps, such as those of Henry Beck and George Salomon. If so, then the automatic generation of metro maps to an acceptable quality may entail the daunting task of operationalising this dynamic balance and encoding it in computer software. 

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This piece was prompted by the requirement that I write a “Critical Travelogue” for one of my MA classes. The assignment required every member of the class to physically make a journey before critically re-imagining it in a short essay. Beyond this, there were very few restrictions on the direction and form the piece could take. Combining my interests in art, activism, memory and Nigerian history as only a project like this would allow, I travelled to an exhibition commemorating Ken Saro-Wiwa entitled Doing Nothing is Not an Option. In order to provide structure as well as interest and humour to the project, I considered details such as mode of travel, embarkation point, and route in order to structure theme and narrative. As a result, the finished piece represents not only a spontaneous consideration of city space, diaspora, and gentrification but also an interaction (or a ‘brief encounter’) between the careful planning and inevitable spontaneity that are essential to both academia and travel, thus creating a dialogue between the disciplines.

Abstract

This article explores the concept of liminal fiction, a new literary genre that takes on the challenge of narrating human rights in the sphere of transitional justice. Liminal fiction makes porous the boundaries between literature, law, history, art, and the archive. Using the work of contemporary visual artists who explore the art of forensics, and ground-breaking research methodologies adopted by social and forensic anthropologists, this article analyses the idea of researching and fictionalising a new memory paradigm, one rooted in the visual imagery of disinterred remains. It suggests that establishing a creative synthesis between interdisciplinary research and writing a work of fiction is a means to open up new avenues for narrating the history of the missing. This is partly achieved through a re-configuration of the role of writer and reader as co-curators, charged with the task of shifting through a multi-layered narrative that links the exhumation of mass graves in Spain in the 2000s with experiences in the country's postwar diaspora and the 'Indignados' demonstrations and occupations of 2011. Further, it becomes possible to consider alternative methods of 'publication' and dissemination of a work of liminal fiction — part-archive, part-book, part-installation — in creative collaborations with 'new musuems of space and emotion.'*

*This refers to a term used by economist and campaigner Susie Symes to evoke the significance of memory sites such as 19 Princelet Street, London, where she is Chair of Trustees. 

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A review of Peter Boxall’s The Value of the Novel (2015). 

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A review of Jan Wilm’s The Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee (2016).

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A review of Elizabeth Morrison and Zrinka Stahuljak's volume, The Adventures of Gillion de Trazegnies: Chivalry and Romance in the Medieval East (2015).

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A review of the exhibition Undressed: a Brief History of Underwear (2 April 2016—12 March 2017, Victoria and Albert Museum, London).