New Economic Criticism

King Lear (1604 to 1605) is widely regarded as one of the greatest works of world literature, but also as one of the most challenging. The challenge is not just in the complexity of the language and the need for notes explaining obsolete terms and idioms-those problems are common to all of William Shakespeare's plays. Instead, King Lear is exceptionally demanding emotionally and imaginatively. an evolutionary perspective can help readers meet these challenges in three main ways: first, by offering a metaphysical vision that corresponds with that of the play; second, by providing ideas about human motives and values concordant with those in the play; and third, by integrating an awareness of universal aspects of human nature with a recognition of the historically specific features of the play.

We propose to read Francis Bacon's doctrine of the idols of the mind as an investigation firmly entrenched in his mental-medicinal concerns and we argue that an important role therein is played by the imagination. Looking at the ways in which the imagination serves to pinpoint several crucial aspects of the idolic mind permits us to signal the explicit or implicit cross-references between what in Bacon's tree of knowledge appear as distinct branches: the various faculties and their arts; the mind, the body, and their league; natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of man. The consequence of this rich picture of the diagnosis of the mind is an equally rich conception of the cure, which comprises both epistemic and physiological aspects. We extract the features of this integrated view out of Bacon's epistemological and medical natural historical writings, which we propose to read in tandem. We also propose a number of sources for Bacon's views on the imagination, whose variety accounts for the multivalent, sometimes elusive, but surely pervasive role of the imagination in the Baconian diagnosis and cure of the mind.

Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are ‘stored’ only superpositionally, and are reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about control of the personal past, and about relations between self and body.

The book’s historical argument is anchored by a reinterpretation of Descartes’ dynamic physiology of memory and strange philosophy of the body. English critics of Descartes’ view of memories as motions complained that mechanistic neurophilosophy could not guarantee order in memory, and instead sought techniques for controlling the brain. In a new account of 18th-century philosophers’ fears of confusion in remembering, the author demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Locke to Reid and Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on ‘the phantasmal chaos of association’. Finally, in a defence of connectionism against Jerry Fodor and against phenomenological and Wittgensteinian critics of passive mental representations, the author shows how problems of the self are implicated in contemporary sciences of mind. The book is an experiment in historical cognitive science, based on a belief that the interdisciplinary study of memory can exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences must aim.

CONTENTS (Download at http://www.johnsutton.net/PhilosophyandMemoryTraces.htm)
1 Introduction: traces, brains, and history
                  Appendix: memory and connectionism

Part I Animal spirits and memory traces
Introduction to Part I: Animal Spirits and Memory Traces
2 Wriggle-work: the quick and nimble animal spirits
3 Memory and 'the Cartesian philosophy of the brain'
                  Appendix 1: nerves, spirits, and traces in Descartes
                  Appendix 2: Malebranche on memory

Part II Inner discipline
Introduction to Part II: Inner Discipline
4 Spirit sciences, memory motions
5 Cognition, chaos, and control in English responses to Descartes' theory of memory
6 Local and distributed representations
7 John Locke and the neurophilosophy of self
                  Appendix: memory and self in Essay II.27
8 The puzzle of survival
9 Spirits, body, and self
10 The puzzle of elimination

Part III 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
Introduction to Part III: 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
11 Fodor, connectionism, and cognitive discipline
12 Associationism and neo-associationism
13 Hartley's distributed model of memory
14 Attacks on neurophilosophy: Reid and Coleridge

Part IV Connectionism and the philosophy of memory
Introduction to Part IV: connectionism and the philosophy of memory
15 Representations, realism, and history
16 Attacks on traces
17 Order, confusion, remembering

References
Index

As a luxury product, fashion is consumed not for rational considerations, but for its affective and emotive power. And it is in regards to this power that, as I will argue, the ongoing process of digitalisation is having its most profound effect. What are the parameters that define how, what and why we consume fashion online? How are marketing experts responding to the newfound agency of the consumer-turned-user? And what consequences do the fluid and non-linear communication constellations between brand and consumer in the digital realm entail for academic distinctions between media subjects and objects, between art and fashion or between content and commerce? This essay makes the attempt to tackle these questions by looking at three case studies: New York-based label Eckhaus Latta, Paris-based label Vetements and Canadian e-commerce site Ssense. Following my analysis of the hypertextual, user-centred marketing strategies used by these brands in order to build affective, emotional and social bonds with their customers, I will propose that the focus of the fashion industry has shifted away from the commodification of products towards the commodification of an expanded lifestyle offer – a development that I consider to be a direct result of the proliferation of digital communication technologies.

"The gendered body takes a phenomenological turn in Brower’s cosmopolitan essay on oral sexuality within philosophical, feminist, and lesbian traditions..."
  ("Editorial" by Michelle Iwen)

Abstract:
The 'traditional philosophical prestige' of seeing and touching, as analyzed by Emmanuel Levinas, comes to dominate the qualities of the other three senses. An investigation of the roles of these prestigious senses, along with the resultant privileged sense-organs of the hand and the eye, within phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and gender- or queer-theory suggests that the part of the prestige of touch will have been related to its function in the phenomenality of feeling. Yet the sense of taste seems to be as applicable, if not more so, to the phenomenal experience of selfhood based on feeling as theorized by Edmund Husserl and Jean-Luc Marion. The tongue, rather than the hand, is reconsidered as a sense-organ of touch in order to salvage the all but lost tang of the tangible. As such, the tongue and taste not only illuminate the shortcomings of binary gender theories based on either inner feeling or outer surface anatomy (or, either interior orifices or exterior appendages), but further discover a remarkable phenomenology of the body to be found in the writings of Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig that moves beyond certain masculine tendencies lurking about the hand and observation (as described by Freud and Butler). The phenomenal experience of the other that yields either empathy (for Husserl), love/eros (for Marion), or hearing and heeding 'Thou shall not kill' (for Levinas) has much to learn from the orality of women's writing. The third body, as written by Cixous, can experience the self as selftaste (as considered by Derrida) and experiences the other as the taste of the other. It is, thereby, opened to a love or a justice (or an erotic justice) beyond the proclamation of Levinas that 'ethics is an optics' as well as any ethics as a mere haptics to be found in Husserl or Marion, where feeling seems always determined by the hand.

Hello!
Thank you for your interest in my study. On my 60th birthday (23.11.2024) and with now 1'001 followers and viewings/downloads of the full text (ca. 400 pages) nearing 3'000, I decided to only offer the contents page, list of illustrations and the introductory chapter (all in all 44 pages) for free.
I do not feel ashamed about this (small) reduction of generosity I have shown all my life as a precarious academic. Back in 2009, the book (a revision of my PHD of 2004) was not published by academic presses because I made it available open access in a library. Silly me. But then: I am very happy that so many people found my arguments useful for their own research or teaching. Thank you to all those largely unknown readers.
From now on: Anyone interested in the full text should contact me about paying arrangements. I am thinking of 20€ (it's 5 times as much and with no colour pictures from amazon). If you cannot afford this, let me know, and I send you the PDF for free.
Best wishes
Manuela

This is what the book is about:
This feminist-materialist study contributes towards a critique of the modern nuclear family in Western Europe by looking back at its cultural constructions and negotiations in early modern England. Connecting the traces of the past to the politics of today, the book offers further bricks to the building of a cultural history of the meanings and practices of family life in their continuity as well as discontinuity. The family is here defined as a discursive field that provides the framework for the analysis of the following interrelated concepts and categories, each being itself constituted by an ensemble of discourses: subjectivity, sex, gender, sexuality, love, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood and childhood, the public and the private, and the nation. While participating in postmodernity's deconstruction of these narratives, the author also dialectically links them to the non-discursive or material reality at the time of their initial production; i.e., to the historical specificity of the socio- economic and political fabric, in particular to the rise of possessive individualism, capitalism and the nation-state.

In cities across the nation, a few enjoy rising affluence while many struggle to get by. This situation is created in part by the practices of traditional economic development. Current trends threaten to worsen, unless we can answer the design challenge before us. Can we create an economic system—beginning at the local level—that builds the wealth and prosperity of everyone? The 20 cities profiled in this Democracy Collaborative report show the way forward. Economic development professionals and mayors are working in partnership with foundations, anchor institutions, unions, community organizations, progressive business networks, workers, and community residents. What’s emerging is a systems approach to creating an inclusive, sustainable economy where all can thrive. The work is place-based, fed by the power of anchor institutions, and built on locally rooted and broadly held ownership. It’s about building community wealth.

Of course, True Detective is neither a philosopher's bedtime story nor supernatural horror, and yet there remains a productive affinity between Ligotti's work and the HBO series. Where Ligotti provides substantial portions of the hallmark character's identity and dialogue, True Detective puts Ligotti's thought experiment to far more practical uses than does Ligotti himself. By intertwining hurricanes and flooding alongside industry and pollution into the background and negative space of the setting, the series implicates the urgent material reality of climate change and environmental collapse into the setting: "all of this is going to be under water in thirty years" ("Long Bright Dark"). In doing so, the series employs Southern gothic conventions to look forward rather than backward in time. Rather than the decay and degeneration of the landscape as reflective of the past, such squalor points forward to a time, rapidly approaching, when the setting will itself be swallowed by the sea. Hence, True Detective enacts a more practical approach to Ligotti's horror, one I'm calling terrestrial horror.

For undergraduate students and their teachers, this book surveys present-day stage and screen performances of early modern drama, introducing performance-oriented methodologies and pedagogies designed to complement text-based analysis. For academics, it brings together the criticism of leading performance scholars and practitioners, with extensive appendices listing performances for reference purposes.

Chapters:
1. Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince, Introduction
2. Lucy Munro, The Early Modern Repertory and the Performance of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries
3. Jeremy Lopez, The Seeds of Time: Student Theatre and the Drama of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries
4. Farah Karim-Cooper, The Performance of Early Modern Drama at Shakespeare’s Globe
5. Coen Heijes, Shakespeare’s Contemporaries at the Royal Shakespeare Company
6. Jacquelyn Bessell, The Actors’ Renaissance Season at the Blackfriars Playhouse
7. Rebecca McCutcheon and Sarah Thom, Dido, Queen of Carthage: Site-specific Marlowe
8. Roberta Barker, ‘A Freshly Creepy Reality’: Jacobean Tragedy and Realist Acting on the Contemporary Stage
9. Pascale Aebischer, Early Modern Drama on Screen
10. Jonathan Heron, Nicholas Monk and Paul Prescott, Letting the Dead Come Out to Dance: An Embodied and Spatial Approach to Teaching Early Modern Drama

Appendices:
11. Karin Brown, Professional Productions of Early Modern Drama, 1960-2010
12. Jeremy Lopez, Performances of Early Modern Drama at Academic Institutions Since 1909
13. Jeremy Lopez, Performances of Early Modern Plays by Amateur and Student Groups Since 1887

Selected bibliography"

This paper in history of philosophy covers themes about determinism from Pomponazzi to Cudworth. It deals with Pico della Mirandola, Lipsius and the neo-Stoics, Pietro Pomponazzi's attacks on free will, the English dramatist John Webster, Marin Mersenne, Hobbes's deterministic psychology, and English NeoPlatonism.

Taking into account the ephemeral nature of performance, this book develops innovative approaches to the reconstruction of historical staging practices through the lens of Spanish classical theater. While poststructuralism and other theories problematize previous studies in performance historiography, this book argues that an interdisciplinary approach to staging reconstruction can produce illuminating conclusions. In this study, Vidler emphasizes the need to take into account, not only structures of culture, but also the human capacity to manipulate those structures for both individual and group expression. Through a detailed analysis of approaches to space, the body, the stage object and the spectator, it is possible to discern analyzable artifacts that permit us to reconstruct significant aspects of early modern stagings. Furthermore, because it actively engages and intertwines both objective and subjective modes of interpretation, Vidler argues that performance theory itself will be the locus of the next breakthroughs in interpretive studies.

Hay y no hay, hay mucho y no hay nada. Los muelles y su infraestructura está hecha a nuevo, pero no hay barcos. La modernidad no ha muerto sino que nos deja despojos constantes de desigualdades y conflictos. Y de allí que el tiempo que nos toca vivir rebosa de contradicciones, oxímorones y representaciones de lo que vivimos.

Th e aim of this article is to explore to what extent the rule of economics commonly known as Gresham's law ("bad money drives out good money") can be extrapolated to verbal language ("bad concepts drive out good concepts"). Consequently, the goal of this article is twofold. First, for Gresham's law to be applied simultaneously to money and language, its unfortunate ("good"/"bad") and obscure ("drives out") wording should be clarifi ed. Second, one should identify the contexts in which the validity of the law could be assessed best, and run a very preliminary test. For this purpose, the circulation of the adjective твердый ("hard", "strong", or "stable" in Russian) in the word combination твердая валюта ("hard currency") in use in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s was scrutinized.

This special issue explores how finance deploys time, structures the future, and interacts with actors and institutions that sometimes function according to very different temporal regimes. Finance capitalism's logic of recurrence, repetitive cycles, and successive ruptures has long been with us, but the essays in this special issue are particularly interested in how recent decades of intensified financialization have restructured temporal experience. They interrogate the production and dissemination of agency in an age of acceleration, risk, and uncertainty, asking how the temporality inscribed in financial transactions emerges from and simultaneously shapes individual and social practice. Topics covered range from the logic of finance and foundational concepts of financial theory to the intersection between objective structures and social practice, the role of literature, and finally questions of social insecurity, political action, and the possibility of resistance within a context of competing temporalities. In this introduction, the editors delineate some fundamental concepts and questions for our financial times.

This article explores Riddell's representational strategies around gender: in particular her male narrators and her female characters made monstrous by money. It argues that Riddell, conscious of social prohibitions on financial knowledge in women, employs male protagonists to subversive effect, installing in her stories a 'feminine' wisdom about the judicious use of wealth. Her narratives identify the Gothic potential of money to dehumanise, foregrounding the culpability of economic arrangements in many of the horrors of her society. While they contain pronounced elements of social critique, they ultimately however defend late-Victorian capitalism by proff ering exemplars of the ethical financial practice by which money's action is to be kept benign.

Bu çalışmada, Facebook ve Twitter gibi sosyal ağların, kullanıcı emeğini dijitalleştirerek üretilen enformasyonu ölçülebilir kıldığı ve reklamverenlere pazarlanacak hale getirerek metalaştırdığı varsayımından hareketle, sosyal ağların zorlayıcılığı hakkında bir araştırma gerçekleştirilmiştir. Sosyal ağlarda kullanıcı emeğinin sayısal olarak kodlanabilir metalara dönüşmesi, Christian Fuchs'un emeğin dijitalleşmesi kuramı bağlamında değerlendirilmiştir. Çoklu örnek olay ve içerik çözümlemesi yöntemlerinin kullanıldığı araştırma, sosyal ağlarda çevrimiçi olmadan önce ve çevrimiçi olduktan sonra şeklinde gittikçe muğlaklaşan iki temel ayrıma göre yapılandırılmıştır. Bu esasa göre, mobilize olmuş iletişim teknolojileri sayesinde e-posta ve bildirimler yoluyla sürekli ulaşılabilir bir konumda olan kullanıcılar, öncelikle sosyal ağlara giriş yapmak için, sonra da ağa giriş yaptıktan sonra içerik üretmek ve ağı zenginleştirecek biçimde faaliyetlerde bulunmak için zorlanmaktadırlar. Bu bağlamda sosyal ağ sermayedarlarının, kullanıcı bilgilerini, ürettikleri içerikleri ve onların her türlü çevrimiçi faaliyetini reklamverenlere pazarlama yoluyla enformasyon tabanlı bir sömürü gerçekleştirdikleri söylenebilir. Bu çerçevede, sosyal ağlar aracılığıyla kapitalizmin dijital bir görünüm kazandığı ve böylelikle emeksermaye çelişkisinin daha da arttığı düşünülmektedir.

Despite the significant body of criticism dedicated to economics and the history of the novel, there is still much work to be done exploring the dense interconnections between emerging capitalism and Victorian literature. Each of the three monographs that are the subject of this review offers original and important contributions to this critical terrain. All three explore how literary texts negotiate and narrativize complex ideas about economic structures and relationships. Although their theoretical commitments vary—theological and historicist for Blumberg, structuralist for Siegel, psychoanalytic and narratological for Kreisel—each is committed to practices of historicized interpretation, predicated on the assumption that literature contains, as Kreisel puts it, textual “symptoms” of its cultural and discursive context (15). Thus close textual readings illuminate how self-sacrifice shifts in the nineteenth century from a dominant cultural value to an ambivalent, morally ambiguous one (Blumberg); how condescension begins to take on its modern connotations as a patronizing power play that asserts rather than relinquishes superiority (Siegel); and how fears about the new capitalist system are embodied in novelistic images of feminized sexuality (Kreisel).

Collateral has since antiquity been used as a safeguard for contractual obligations, such as debt. But how did debt, and in particular government debt, itself become the most common form of collateral in the financial system? In other words, how did government debt become "safe"? The safety of sovereign debt corresponds to the establishment of sovereign creditworthiness: from sovereign bonds being charged a significantly higher interest rate than commercial loans in the Middle Ages to circulating "unsecured", that is, no longer requiring additional security in the form of either collateral or a high interest rate but trading merely on "full faith and credit". Modern finance theory and standard economics have treated the safety of sovereign debt as an assumption that has been fundamental to the main pricing models for stocks and derivatives in the form of the risk-free asset. Economic history at the same time however tells us that there is no such thing as a perfectly safe sovereign. How can one make sense of both these stories: sovereign safety as an axiom of modern finance as well as its historical contingency, relativism and dependency on perception? This chapter traces the answer to this question partly in a forgotten linkage of financial and imaginary fiction and argues that it is in the wider history of the public/ private  and fact/ fiction distinctions as well as their co-evolution that one should seek to place a history of sovereign safety.

This paper presents a brief survey of a trend in literary criticism called the "New Economic Criticism." It focuses on studies that explore the Shakespearean age to contrast what the critical literature has to say about the economic history and culture of the time with the corresponding work of economic historians and some elements of economic theory. It is shown that, with some exceptions, the claims made by economic literary historians are often drawn from questionable economic assumptions and inaccurate historical reconstructions. The paper is in Italian.

A crise econômica que está assolando o Ocidente à mais de cinco anos, não apenas questiona o modelo neoliberal, apontado como o principal responsável da grande crise, mas também a cultura Ocidental que produziu este sistema. Dias a pós dias os escândalos que aparecem envolvendo todos os setores da sociedade manifestam os limites de um sistema econômico que não conseguiu produzir igualdade e bem estar para todos, mas pelo contrario, profundas injustiças. O dato que chama atenção sobre a situação lastimável gerada por esta crise econômica é o crescimento da pobreza que está afetando milhões de pessoas dos assim chamados Países ricos, Países do primeiro mundo. Esta situação questiona o modelo econômico assimilado pelo Ocidente a partir dos anos Oitenta do século passado, ou seja, o modelo Neoliberal.

The volume before you contains a selection of contributions from the workshop “Transformation: Nature and Economy in Modern English and American Culture,” held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb on September 24, 2019. Organized by the Croatian Association for American Studies (CAAS) and the Croatian Association for the Study of English (CASE), the workshop hosted a fine array of international and domestic guests and featured the participation of doctoral students. The editors would like to thank Professor Tatjana Jukić Gregurić and Dr. Martina Domines Veliki, who provided invaluable assistance in the organization of the event. We also thank the participants at the workshop and the authors of the contributions. The workshop was organized as part of the research activities carried out under the auspices of the research group “Transatlantic Literature and the Transformation of the World in the Long Nineteenth Century.”
In addition, this issue features a contribution on Toni Morrison, whose work continues to capture the attention of academic and general readers.

The period of the Renaissance in England is characterized by massive economic and social changes: The development of world trade and the emergence of early capitalism transformed the stratification of English society. This constellation brought to the fore a number of cultural technologies that also had a considerable influence on the literary production of the time, namely practices related to money as a medium of exchange (such as usury, counterfeiting, bills of exchange), practices related to the cultural techniques of printing and writing (such as double-entry bookkeeping and new modes of computation that depended on the written calculus rather than the mechanics of the abacus), and finally practices mediated by the body (such as 'counterfeiting' and dissimulating affective states in social situations). These technologies are nothing less than mere practical innovations that come to organize the early modern market economy, they shape social relationships and identities: Shylock's 'person' is famously inseparable from his 'purse'; similarly practices of itemizing and calculating a person's qualities frequently determine love relationships in early modern city comedies. In this seminar we are going to read dramatic texts by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries (Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Ford) as well as excerpts from popular treatises on usury, trade, and arithmetic (Thomas Wilson, John Mellis), finally on court culture and the passions (Arthur Warren, Thomas Wright, Robert Burton, etc.) and discuss how economic and technological developments of this highly prolific epistemological constellation are reflected in the literature and theatrical practice of the time.

The smart city? Yes ! But while not forgetting to strive for an integrated process !!! So, remembering that our first priority and this is proved, we must now ensure "the massive and urgent job creation for the benefit of the excluded, especially among juniors but also among seniors." Ultimately, in order to guarantee a successful of our intiative, simply because this go through creditworthy future, perennial and salutary, to the benefit of future inhabitants of our famous "Smart City". Of course, without any credulity, we realize that this wish is first to realize the smart city in targetting, that we hope exclusively in the first step, to the benefit of privilegedpeople especially among the people with good birth! Moreover, we must avoid above all, and for any reason whatsoever, here and there, otherwise in accompanying the deepening of the underground dynamic towards a dual society. Unfortunately this fact is already proven inside the traditional cities and especially more in emergent countries. This sort of preoccupation it'll be the question then that definitely requires a new strategic approach and policy, especially against our conceptual and paradigmatic cultural environment, economic and politic, conjonctural otherwise structural. So, this is against the point of vue generated by our classic excellence class, fostered by the court of sycophants, inside the sovereign power hierarchy. This, in distributing the broad control abilities, on behalf of the political sacrosanct principle of subsidiarity announced; So to the pleasure of the most modest hierarchical level, in giving a large power of hidden but unwavering constriction, that is announced briskly by the supposedly democratic and parliamentary governance. So, paradoxically, and one would say euphemistically, we are suggesting this new approach, that is called to don't infer itself from their famous system of values. This former traditionally political system, who is satisfied to promote a discrete and far governance, certainly not in obliging usually from his initiative, this in order to watch and foster the responsible management of societal complexity. By the way, don't forget, that daily thought process is strongly endorsed by our said truly ancestral global intellectual ecosystem, promouving the competitive divergence rather than the mutual convergence (divide to reign ?). So in order not to have to bother, in redundant manner, and at all hierarchical systemic levels, normally concerned about the : complexity management, to the subject of an urgent societal research by the adoption of a systematic research of a multidimensional convergence (local, national, European and international).

În Spaţiul în romanul anglo-saxon contemporan coord. de Pia Brânzeu, Ed. Art, Bucureşti, 2011, pp. 17-28 Ca hartă a icoanei timpului invizibil, spaţiul este contrapartea obiectivă a ideologiei reprezentării. El se naşte prin abstractizarea progresivă care a dislocat locul, 1 definit în raport cu sacrul, familiarul ori metonimicul, din poziţia centrală pe care o ocupase pînă în epoca Renaşterii şi, astfel, a înlocuit dominaţia topocentrismului cu aceea a spaţialităţii moderne. Aceasta din urmă, derivînd vecinătatea din substituţie, transcende capturile empirice şi sfîrşeşte prin a calcula "locurile" prin parametrii specifici spaţiului -poziţionalitate, arie, (non-)coincidenţe geometrice etc. Cele două sensuri ale dominantei spaţiale moderne sînt mutual implicate: cartografierea ajunge să preceadă simbolic teritoriile şi, reprezentîndu-le ca spaţii abstracte, să amortizeze impactul timpului asupra "locurilor" dislocate din angrenajul realului şi lăsate acuma în grija reprezentării, ca simulacre sau exemple. Dislocarea aceasta coincide, în bună parte, declinului fizicii aristotelice în Occidentul secolelor XVI-XVII. În vechea organizare a cunoaşterii, locul era definit ca o asociere dintre quanta şi qualia: fiind undeva şi însemnînd ceva, real. Modernitatea a separat cantitatea de calitate: Galileo, Harvey, Descartes, Newton... au extins noţiunea de univers, pe care au făcut-o dependentă de calcul, şi i-au conferit legitimitate separînd cantitatea numărabilă de calitatea inefabilă. 2 Locurile astfel dislocate au devenit permutabile. Această dislocare a dus la dezlănţuirea timpului secular. Universul infinit al barocului este şi colecţia dislocărilor imaginabile, şi imaginea Totului spulberat de sălbăticia timpului (marele gol format din goluri, după cum l-a văzut Baltasar Gracián în Peştera Nimicului din Criticón). Reacţia la această violentă schimbare este în primul rînd de natură estetică, deşi subtextul său teologic, deşi slab, nu e neglijabil. Reacţionînd direct, indirect sau preventiv la politica generalizată a dislocării, literatura timpuriu-modernă a imaginat o varietate de ficto-spaţii pentru a contrabalansa Spaţiul. În cazul literaturii engleze, ficto-spaţiile sînt entităţi "imaginale" date ca alternative (ca şi cum; als ob; as if) pierderilor succesive ale locurilor, iar, mai tîrziu, ale teritoriilor imperiale. Ele reconfigurează o spaţialitate care, vreme de o jumătate de mileniu, a crescut în proporţie onco-geometrică.