Department of Humanities

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    Representing nature in Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe’s Diary: an examination of Toronto’s colonial past (Canada)
    (Prairie Perspectives: Geographical Essays, 2012-10) Murnaghan, Ann Marie
    In this article the author examines how gender, class, and race are important factors in the construction of historical discourses of nature. Using a close reading of the diary of a government official’s wife at the turn of the nineteenth century, three themes of colonialism appear. The contradictions of rationalizing the landscape through cartography, counting nature using botany and natural history, and romanticizing the landscape through painting and nature writing, highlight how the colonial project was a complex weave of ideas about nature, as commodity, scientific fact, and moral instruction. By exploring the diverse media in Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe’s Diary – maps, paintings, and writings – a nuanced picture of an upper-class, white woman’s role in the Upper Canadian colonial project is drawn in relief. The article explores the ways that historic discourses of nature remain in cities and are easily (and often uncritically) incorporated in current day geographies. The author argues that the colonial past must be thoroughly interrogated in order to understand how discourses of nature have been constructed to serve certain interests, disguise the processes of colonialism, and reinforce certain ideas about gender and nature in the present.
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    It’s a Kind of Magic: Situating Nostalgia for Technological Progress and the Occult in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes
    (2014) Reisenleitner, Markus
    Guy Ritchie’s recent blockbuster success with a revisionist Sherlock Holmes is the latest in a series of popular films and fiction to have reinvigorated a nostalgic imaginary of London’s past that places the former capital of the Empire at the crossroads of a persistent Manichean battle between empiricist-driven technological progress and traditions of occult knowledge supposedly submerged in the 17th century yet continuing to trickle into the heart of the Empire from its colonies. By tracing some of these historical layers sedimented into 21st-century popular imaginaries of London’s past, this paper explores the mechanisms of popular culture’s production of nostalgia that mediate public memories and histories and suture them to the imaginary urban geographies that constitute the space of the global city through its metonymic sites and its materialized histories.
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    Digital Humanities: Experimentation and Comparative Literature
    (2015-01-10) Reisenleitner, Markus
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    Ruts of Gentrification: Breaking the Surface of Vienna’s Changing Cityscape
    (2018-07-18) Reisenleitner, Markus
    Last year, the city of Vienna celebrated the 150-year anniversary of the opening of the Ringstrasse, the central ring road that stands as symbol of the huge structural renewal that accompanied the transformation of the Habsburg empire’s capital into a rapidly growing modern city. The anniversary acquired poignancy on account of the way Vienna’s population is once again growing rapidly, with an estimated ¼ million people to be added to the city’s population over the next decade. While accommodating urban migrants was not a priority in Ringstrasse Vienna, and working class districts are not part of iconic mapped mediations, the current city council, a coalition of Social Democrats and the Green Party, studiously tries to avoid 19th-century urban modernity’s “mistakes” in their efforts to accommodate the growing population, and they let the Viennese, and the world, know. This time, GIS and digital mapping are mobilized for planning, mediating and communicating large-scale development and renewal projects.  This paper looks at the mediations of three crucial sites of contemporary urban transformation in Vienna that mobilize the affordances of new technologies: “Loftcity,” a loft development cum cultural centre on the site of one of Vienna’s largest factories, the Ankerbrotfabrik; the transformation of the district surrounding Vienna’s new Hauptbahnhof; and Aspern, “Vienna’s Urban Lakeside,” a new satellite town promoted as a city of the future. By comparing the historical traces that remain in the mediations of these sites with their 19th-century counterparts, a geocritical reading of Vienna’s gentrification emerges that situates spatial practices in historically grown lines of connectivity, presaging and transcending traditional forms of classification, such as national divides or urban/suburban dichotomies.
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    Reason’s Reasons: First Principles in the Second-Century Pagan Apologetic
    (Philotheos, 2018-09) Vučković, Marko
    The 2-c debate between the Greek Apologists and the pagan Graeco-Roman tradition is multifaceted and complex. Common ground can be found in the mutual commitment to reason as a reflection of the Logos: Reason, or the rationality embedded in things. Logos, in this picture, is participated in through a performance of reasoning whose reliability is presupposed in the discourses of both debating parties—contextualized here as the presupposition that the deliverances and activity of reason are reliable for uncovering reality. Presuppositions are starting points and driving principles of inquiry, here designated as first principles. One presuppositional conflict between 2-c Greek Apologists, taking the apologetic works of Justin, Theophilus, Athenagoras, and the author of the Epistle to Diognetus as a sample, and the pagan tradition, taking Celsus as its 2-c culmination, is over how to justify the commitment to reason’s reliability in the above sense. My claim in this paper is twofold: first, that the pagan position is unable in principle to demonstrate the reliability of its own reasoning and that all such inquiry is circular: it is always a further question for the pagan why reasoning reveals reality. I propose that what would count as an answer to this challenge is a metaphysical ‘fit’ between human embodiment and reality. And second, that the Apologists avoid this unhappy conclusion by committing themselves to the embodiment of Reason in Jesus—that the embodied act of human reasoning reveals reality because Reason itself is embodied in the same way. The upshot is that unless the pagan abandons his position, he is trapped in a circular epistemology and cannot encounter the Christian witness on its own terms.
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    Murderers of the Real: Transaesthetics and the Art of Holiness
    (Belgrade: Gnomon, Podgorica: Matica srpska, 2021) Vučković, Marko
    This paper explores the ontology of the beautiful from the standpoint of competing logics, i.e., ways of speaking the Logos. The first is a theo-logic centered on the analogy of being, which uniquely regards reality as Logos—a structured hierarchy of the real, a ‘Who’ rather than a ‘What’—which provides an ontology of beauty as desirable being, and ultimately, the desirable Being. The correct response to reality is thus holiness, the sacral separateness of God imparted to, and thus borrowed by and reflected through, creatures. The competing logic is what Baudrillard calls the simulacral, in which the real is suspended by its own model; the image exposes the poverty of the real and causes it to disappear altogether, revealing a transaesthetics of banality and indifference, a totalizing counterfeit of the real that is beyond real difference, beyond Logos—and therefore beyond structured hierarchy, beyond beauty and ugliness. The simulated real is thus the world of the spectacle, the world as product of consumer gaze. A way to repudiate the simulation, the murderous image, to uncover the real always and already grounding the image is to return to Logos: to emplace the image in a hierarchically relational context within Logos. The upshot is that, when so emplaced, the gaze of the image tells a different story: the world is not one of consumerist spectacle but of mutual self-gifting. Amidst the barbarism of the dislocated consumer ego, we can conscientiously commune with neighbor and turn away from what Augustine termed fellowship with the demons.
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    Christological Controversies: Will the Real Catholic Žižek Please Stand Up?
    (European Journal of Theology, 2023-10-01) Vučković, Marko
    Plato’s dialogue Parmenides contains the infamous ontological bombshell, the so-called Third Man argument. This argument involves a reductio criticism of the forms, arguing that the reductio premise – roughly, ‘there cannot be any ontological interpenetration between the One and the many’ – is false. The argument intimates that the only way for thought to move beyond the forms is to accept the ‘impossible’ object, the nonsensical One-and-many. This article calls any ontology which accepts this Third Man argument and attempts to answer it on its own terms, ‘material dialectic’. The high-profile debate between John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek in The Monstrosity of Christ brings the relevance of this dialectic into stark relief. Both authors accept the material dialectic and mobilise it toward competing christological theses. Yet it is important to navigate the Third Man argument in such a way as to keep a dyophysite Christology in order to satisfy orthodox theological pressures. I will therefore advance two conclusions: first, that the material dialectic is a valid analytical project; and second, that neither Milbank nor Žižek espouses an orthodox Christology: Milbank’s is monophysite while Žižek’s is patripassian. Following Milbank, I will call the final (dyophysite) corrective the ‘Catholic Žižek’ – only, contra Milbank, it will be the real Catholic Žižek.
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    If One has the Floor, does One also need to Dance? Topology, Choreology, and the Structure of Digital Space
    (University of Alberta Library, 2024-07-01) Vučković, Marko
    Marcello Vitali-Rosati, in the essay “The Writer is the Architect” complimented by other works, provides a two-part thesis. The first argues that space is a chiasmic structure (as inside-outside); and the second argues that this structure reveals the productive role of the subject in constructing digital space (as architect). The essay here seeks to elucidate this logic and to expose it to a Lacanian critique: that it is a hysterical discourse unable in principle to emancipate digital spaces because it entails a purely immanent subject—in short, a subject which is solely product, not producer, of digital space

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