Reading Cultural Texts: Comment on Griswold

1990 ◽  
Vol 95 (6) ◽  
pp. 1577-1580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman K. Denzin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Texts

Voices and Visions: Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinne Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Family Care ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Disease Treatment ◽  
History Of Disease ◽  
Health And Illness ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Texts

A properly critical medical humanities is also a historically grounded medical humanities. Such historical grounding requires taking a long cultural perspective, going beyond traditional medical history – typically the history of disease, treatment and practice – to trace the origins and development of the ideas that underpin medicine in its broadest sense – ideas concerning the most fundamental aspects of human existence: health and illness, body and mind, gender and family, care and community. Historical sources can only go so far in illuminating such topics; we must also look to other cultural texts, and in particular literary texts, which, through their imaginative worlds, provide crucial insights into cultural and intellectual attitudes, experience and creativity. Reading from a critical medical humanities perspective requires not only cultural archaeology across a range of discourses, but also putting past and present into conversation, to discover continuities and contrasts with later perspectives. Medical humanities research is illuminated by cultural and literary studies, and also brings to them new ways of seeing; the relation is dynamic. This chapter explores the ways mind, body and affect are constructed and intersect in medieval thought and literature, with a particular focus on how voice-hearing and visionary experience are portrayed and understood.

Black in English: Race, Migration, and National Belonging in Postcolonial Italy

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorgia García-Peña
Keyword(s):  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Transnational Networks ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Cultural Texts

Building on the growing body of scholarship on comparative race and ethnicity, this article considers how immigrants of color and their descendants interpret, translate, and deploy politicized ethno-racial terms (Black, Latinx) to confront racism in contemporary Italy. Through the analysis of cultural texts, including interviews, speeches, and a novel, I argue that terms, ideologies, and racial processes have become both local and global as immigrants and new citizens build transnational networks of contestation from which to confront the violence of coloniality and exploitation that led them to migrate while asserting belonging in the nations in which they reside. 

Language, Body, Nature: Tackling the Representation of the Kyshtym Disaster in Kate Brown’s Plutopia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamila Gieba
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Nuclear Radiation ◽  
Nuclear Families ◽  
The Public ◽  
Production Site ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Plutonium Production ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Surrounding Areas

The article examines ways of representing nuclear catastrophe in Kate Brown's Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. In 1957 an explosion in the Mayak works - a plutonium production site - led to massive contamination of the surrounding areas. The event remained a closely kept secret till 1992, absent from the public sphere and cultural texts, despite the fact that the scale of contamination was as big as the Chernobyl explosion. One of the reasons for this was the difficulty of representing nuclear radiation. The author focuses on three contexts of this impossibility: in relation to the cognitive theory of the metaphor, the figure of the sick body as bearer of memory, and the invisibility of the nuclear landscape.

Dead Pledges

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie McClanahan
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Credit Scoring ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Microeconomic Theory ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Irrational Behavior ◽  
Cultural Texts

Dead Pledges is a study of our contemporary culture of debt. Examining novels, poems, artworks, photographs, and films produced in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, this book aims to show how US cultural texts have grappled with the rise and fall of the financialized consumer credit economy. It argues that debt is such a ubiquitous yet elusive social form that we can most clearly understand it by looking at how our culture has sought to represent it. Whether popular entertainment or avant-garde art, post-crisis cultural texts allow us to map the landscape of contemporary debt: from foreclosure to credit scoring, student debt to securitized risk, microeconomic theory to anti-eviction activism. Across this range of sites, this book offers an account of the theoretical and political consequences of debt: how it affects our ideas of personhood and morality; how it deploys a language of irrational behavior and risky excess; how it transforms our relationship to property and possession. Bringing together economic history, debt theory, and cultural analysis, Dead Pledges demonstrates how our understanding of the economy can be illuminated by culture. What is at stake in our contemporary culture of debt is not just our measures of economic credibility but also the limits of our imaginative credulity; not just our account of economic character but also our literary characters; not just the money we see but also the way we see money; not just how we pay but also how we imagine getting payback.

Lament as Womanist Healing in Times of Global Violence

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Communal Violence ◽  
Loss And Grief ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Women And Girls

Globally, violence against women and girls is a pandemic—resulting in massive trauma and death. Certain scriptures and cultural texts condone the aggression; others adamantly protest heinous, unjust behaviors. Lament provides an avenue for naming and processing individual and communal violence, grief, and pain. This essay explores lament as response to pain and suffering generated amidst sexual and domestic violence, from a global womanist perspective. After providing a brief overview of my womanist biblical hermeneutic, this essay: (1) explores lament as a response to patriarchal misogynistic violence in Scripture, in dialog with global domestic violence; (2) explores lament embodied in selected Psalms, lamentations, and a lament by Beyoncé; and (3) concludes by invoking lament as a pathway of engaging global, daily loss and grief.

Rape, Representation, and the Endurance of Hegemonic Masculinity

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (13) ◽  
pp. 1613-1630 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Swanson
Keyword(s):  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Texts

This article mines the history of rape jurisprudence to illuminate how the legal treatment of wartime rape informs long-standing gendered tropes that dominate its understanding on the ground as well as its representation in literary and cultural texts. The essay concludes by reading Congolese novelist Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog as a model for a dialogic literary imagination capable of revealing the fatal consequences of toxic masculinity as it informs not only the perpetration of rape in wartime, but also the possibility for either perpetrator or victim to achieve subjectivity free from the burdens of brutally constraining gender norms.

scholarly journals Gender Essentialism in Chinese Reality TV: A Case Study of You Are So Beautiful

2021 ◽  
pp. 152747642110272
Author(s):  
Altman Yuzhu Peng
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Reality Tv ◽  
Feminist Analysis ◽  
Chinese Context ◽  
Gender Essentialism ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
Tv Production

This article provides a feminist analysis of Chinese reality TV, using the recent makeover show— You Are So Beautiful (你怎么这么好看) as a case study. I argue that the notion of gender essentialism is highlighted in the production of You Are So Beautiful, which distances the Chinese show from its original American format— Queer Eye. This phenomenon is indicative of how existing gender power relations influence the production of popular cultural texts in post-reform China, where capitalism and authoritarianism weave a tangled web. The outcomes of the research articulate the interplay between post-socialist gender politics and reality TV production in the Chinese context.

Of Comics and Charisma: Representing Transpacific White Masculinities

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina D. Owens
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
White Male ◽  
English Teachers ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Charismatic Authority ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Madame Butterfly ◽  
White Masculinities ◽  
Male Heterosexual

AbstractThis article employs palimpsestuous reading practices to query the transpacific reach and imperial pedigree of the comic strip “Charisma Man.” Turning to Max Weber’s theory of “charismatic authority” to understand the comic’s humorous portrayals of white male heterosexual privilege in Asia, the article proposes that the comic strip illuminates the patterns of raced and gendered “hereditary charisma” that continue to haunt transpacific relations. “Charisma Man,” penned by a team of North American men living in Japan, links contemporary white migrants across Asia – especially native English teachers – with a longue durée of Euro-American imperial actors abroad and builds meaning through intertextual engagement with the iconic cultural texts Superman and Madame Butterfly. The article concludes that “Charisma Man” makes light of white male hereditary charisma in Asia through a layering of temporally-disjointed transpacific discourses and, in turn, adds one more layer to a palimpsestuous sedimentation of sexist and racist hierarchies, normalizing their continuation within contemporary globalization.

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