The Mighty Walser: From a Short Story by Robert Walser, a Choreographer and Director Have Made a Mesmerizing Piece of “Perambulatory Poetics.”

By Christmas Day 1956, when his frozen body was found by schoolchildren in a field of snow near the asylum where he had resided for more than twenty years, the Swiss writer Robert Walser had been largely forgotten. There had been a time when the failed actor and former butler, born in 1878, was well known among Europe’s literary intelligentsia: Robert Musil, Herman Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka, and Walter Benjamin all admired his short stories and novels. During the 1920s, though, he was increasingly afflicted by hallucinations. In 1933 he entered a sanatorium, announcing: “I am not here to write, but to be mad.”[i][i] Middleton, introduction, 12

The future of agriculture and food: Evaluating the holistic costs and benefits

Inadequacies of the current agriculture and food systems are recognised globally in the form of damages to environment and human health. In addition, the prevailing economic and policy systems do not reflect these damages in its accounting systems and staThe authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The TEEBAgriFood study is funded by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, European Commission, and the Government of Norway

Brick Lane: A Materialist Reading of the Novel and its Reception

Monica Ali’s 2003 novel Brick Lane was feted by the literary establishment but prompted protests on Brick Lane itself. In a now familiar pattern, such protests were generally regarded as reflecting a conflict between creative freedom and religious or cultural minority rights. In this article, the underlying assumptions of such an interpretation are challenged, suggesting that, in a context of racial and religious inequality, where access to the public sphere is unevenly distributed, the protests are better understood as symptomatic of a subordinate social position. The occlusion of social and historical context in the mainstream response to the protests is mirrored in the novel’s obscuring of the power relations between the Bangladeshi community it focuses on and wider British society. It is argued that, by focusing on the patriarchy of that community in isolation, the novel fosters a culturalism that allows it to be read as an allegory of a woman’s individual liberation from community oppression and her journey into the neutral space of an ‘inclusive’ multicultural Britain. The necessity of a collective politics of self-representation is thus elide