Call for Book Reviewers
Call for Book Reviewers
Aigne, 2024 Issue
Theme: “Encounters”
Deadline: 1st September, 2023
Aigne (“Mind”) is a peer-reviewed online postgraduate journal that falls under the auspices of the Graduate School of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at University College Cork, Cork, Ireland. The journal is scheduled to release Issue 10 in Spring of 2024.
The aim of this issue is to engage with the theme of “Encounters” in diverse ways. This has led to the following selection of books for review.
Battell, Sophie. 2023. On the Threshold: Hospitality in Shakespeare’s Drama. Edinburgh University Press [Digital Copy]
Abstract: In this critical analysis, Sophie E. Battell examines hospitality in Shakespeare’s plays. By drawing on literary theory, modern philosophy, and anthropology as well as early modern scientific and religious texts, the book advances our understanding of Shakespeare as a dramatist concerned with the ethical questions at stake in encounters between guests and hosts of various kinds.
The close readings and scholarly interventions presented here reconceive the plays in terms of a poetics of hospitality while arguing for an expansive, far-reaching vision of what it means to be open to the world and welcoming of others. Moving from the levels of subjectivity, the body, and the senses to architecture, economics, legal discourse, and the natural environment, On the Threshold not only makes important contributions to Shakespeare studies but forges new connections between Renaissance literary scholarship and contemporary debates on the politics of migrants and refugees.
Fanning, Bryan. 2023. Public Morality and the Culture Wars: The Triple Divide. Emerald Publishing. Bingley. [Digital Copy]
Abstract: How is public morality understood in the twenty-first century, and what effect does this have on legislation and social policy?
Public Morality and the Culture Wars is a strictly non-polemical analysis of the intellectual and ideological conflicts at the heart of the ‘culture wars’. Taking debates on human nature, sexuality, gender identity, abortion, censorship, and free speech, Bryan Fanning offers an accessible analysis of modern public morality, identifying a ‘triple divide’ between conservative, liberal and progressive viewpoints.
A nuanced analysis of ‘culture wars’ now dividing Anglophone democracies is badly needed. Public Morality and the Culture Wars makes a vibrant and invigorating contribution to the debate, essential reading for scholars and students in the fields of social policy, law, politics, philosophy, sociology and social justice.
Mowchun, Trevor. 2022. Metaphysics and the Moving Image: Paradise Exposed. Edinburgh University Press. [Digital copy].
Abstract: Metaphysics and the Moving Image is an investigation into the medium of film's inheritance of metaphysics – Western philosophy's oldest and most ambitious form of 'truth-seeking.' Why does the moving image of film take up this ancient quest at the very moment when philosophy sought to abandon it once and for all? As the long age of metaphysics comes to a close with the Nietzschean ‘death of God’ and its crisis of nihilism, the emergence of film at the dawn of a new century brings forth a new absolute value, both life-affirming and more-than-human: ‘the world in its own image.’ Film radically transforms the metaphysical paradigm from rational speculation through concepts to mechanical revelation through images and sounds – the ‘dream machine’ at the heart of the medium’s capacity to enlighten and enthral.
In this book, Trevor Mowchun discusses film theorists and philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Stanley Cavell, Robert Bresson, and Heinrich von Kleist, in relation to films which possess a ‘metaphysical film style,’ including The Thin Red Line and The Turin Horse. Painting and photography are also considered a precursor to the moving image, but it’s a specifically cinematic metaphysics which promises to lead us out of the traps of abstraction and alienation inadvertently set by old metaphysics. Mowchun demonstrates that in a post-metaphysical world, questions about being, value, truth, life and death return with renewed force, finding concrete yet open-ended responses in cinema.
Plamper, Jan. 2023. We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2023. [Digital copy].
Abstract: In 2015, Germany agreed to accept a million Syrian refugees. The country had become an epicenter of global migration and one of Europe's most diverse countries. But was this influx of migration new to Germany? In this highly readable volume, Jan Plamper charts the groups and waves of post-1945 mobility to Germany. We Are All Migrants is the first narrative history of multicultural Germany told through life-stories. It explores the experiences of the 12.5 million German expellees from Eastern Europe who arrived at the end of the Second World War; the 14 million 'guest workers' from Italy and Turkey who turned West Germany into an economic powerhouse; the GDR's Vietnamese labor migrants; and the 2.3 million Germans and 230,000 Jews who came from the Soviet Union after 1987. Without minimizing racism, We Are All Migrants shows that immigration is a success story – and that Germany has been, and is, one of the most fascinating laboratories on our planet in which multiple ways of belonging, and ethnic, national, and supranational identities, are hotly debated and messily lived.
This book is important reading to those interested in cultural and social history and cultural studies.
To be considered for the review of one of the above books, send an email stating intent to aigne@ucc.ie by 1st September, 23. Please title your email “Book Title Review: Surname, Forename” and attach an up-to-date Resume/CV.
Selected reviewers will be notified by 8th September, 2023 and will be required to submit a c. 1000-word review by 20th November, 2023. To be considered for publication, all reviews must adhere to Aigne’s Author Guidelines (http://aigne.ucc.ie/index.php/aigne/about/submissions#authorGuidelines) and be thoroughly proofread prior to submission.
All queries may be directed to Book Review Editors, Guy Gerba, Laurence Counihan, and Noreen Kane at aigne@ucc.ie.
