scholarly journals Critique. Division. An Archaeology of Separation and a Salvaging Etymology

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 123-151
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Trzeciak ◽  
Jakob Ziguras

The goal of this essay is twofold: firstly, it is a description a post-critical tendency within the contemporary, Anglo-American humanities; secondly, it presents propositions which broaden the boundaries current in the post-critical current, which lead to the replacement of critical sci-entificity with an affirmation of everyday readerly affects. The claims regarding the rejection of a criticism based on suspicion, formulated by, among others, Rita Felski, accentuate the elite character of reading, the goal of which is the unveiling of the economico- political entan-glement of the text as a product of historical reality. The distrust towards the surface of the text and the illusion of aesthetic autonomy, central for cultural studies, raised the critical atti-tude to the rank of an activity that is revelatory and privileged. The opponents of an unmask-ing criticism underline its limitations—unmasking reveals the ultimate source of every cultural production, the logic of capitalism, the total character of which leaves no chance for change. In defense of change, and in the hope of restoring to literature a widespread interest, there appear tendencies which bring back the individual experience of reading, the basis of which is to be aesthetic pleasure, freed from the historical context and its determinants. In the article, examples of such tendencies will be pointed out, as also will be their consequences caused by the elevation and universalisation of non-professional reading. The rejection of the political task of criticism leads to the questioning of its anti-systemic potential; in turn, the apotheosis of suspicion paralyses the postulative dimension of criticism. For this reason, in the last part of the essay, I propose going beyond oppositional con ceptualisations in the direction of a criti-cism that is situated and material, and whose model, in my rendering, is subordi nated knowledge.

Author(s):  
Emma Simone

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.


2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Owen Whooley

Tied to meaning-making, narratives are saturated with political relevance. Narratives do political work on both the individual and collective levels. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the political work performed by a given narrative, both the historical context and local context must be analyzed. This paper uses a comparative dialogic analysis derived from M. M. Bakhtin to illuminate the different types of political work that narratives can accomplish. I compare two slave narratives, each recalling an incident of violence against a slave. Although the narratives describe similar events, their portrayals of slavery differ greatly because of the different political work they perform in their respective contexts. One narrative, produced in conjunction with the abolitionist movement, serves as a piece of political propaganda that frames slavery in an uncompromisingly harsh light. The other narrative, taken from a WPA interview in the 1930s, reveals narrative as a site of political conflict between blacks and whites during the Jim Crow era.


Author(s):  
Stephen LeMay ◽  
Scott B. Keller

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the past 50 years of driver research from a historical context linked to the political and economic developments of the US motor carrier industry. Design/methodology/approach A comprehensive literature review was conducted and studies were targeted that exemplified eras of historic change pertaining to trucking published within the top-tier logistics journals. Findings Distinctive categorizations of driver research emerged: organizing era from 1930 to 1949, era of the collective mind from 1950 to 1979, era of the individual from 1980 to 2009 and the era of the driver as extension of the firm from 2010 to present. Research streams are highly influenced by current industry developments, economic conditions and the political landscape. Research limitations/implications The chronological framework of research established specific time-based eras. An alternative framework or other emerging eras may be conceived as scholars consider factors in addition to those explored within this research. Practical implications Managers within developing countries may leverage the research within a specific era to help resolve driver problems that have already been researched in the USA. Scholars are encouraged to further study truck drivers as critical extensions of the firm in light of the advances in autonomous vehicles, drones and other technology impacting the motor carrier industry. Social implications For nearly a half century, the turnover of truck drivers has been a major issue. This research provides driver managers with the knowledge to better understand and to more adequately provide for the needs and welfare of truck drivers. Originality/value This research is the first to fully connect the research and developments pertaining to the motor carrier industry, the occupation of truck driving and the historical developments of US policy and the economy.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Erlin

According to Rita Felski, context is overrated. Even in the sophisticated variants of contextualization typical of the New Historicism, she explains, scholars' obsession with historical context as the ultimate source of textual meaning disregards the capacity of literature to resonate across time and space. "Why is it," she writes, "that we can feel solicited, button-holed, stirred up, by words that were drafted eons ago?" (576). Felski is not the first to raise such objections. In an essay from 2001, Russell Berman takes a similar approach to the politics of periodization, pointing out how periodizing a work can serve to discipline it, that is to say, to deny its claim on the reader's present. For Berman, "A literary-critical culture that values historical frames over 'artistic pleasure,' . . . tends to dismiss the diachronic moment in any reading, and with it the potential of tradition, the capacity precisely to transcend the constraints of the isolated historical moment." Both Felski and Berman present powerful arguments against the fetishization of contemporaneity as the source of the truth of a work. In their focus on affect, however, they neglect a crucial facet of the transtemporal resonance they seek to underscore. To limit oneself to the question of how and why literature can "solicit," "button-hole," and "stir us up" is to understate its role as both an instrument of cognition and a means of fostering particular cognitive capacities, or at least to sidestep the constitutive role of cognition in the experience of aesthetic pleasure.


2019 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 327-334
Author(s):  
Inga V. Zheltikova ◽  
Elena I. Khokhlova

The article considers the dependence of the images of future on the socio-cultural context of their formation. Comparison of the images of the future found in A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s works of various years reveals his generally pessimistic attitude to the future in the situation of social stability and moderate optimism in times of society destabilization. At the same time, the author's images of the future both in the seventies and the nineties of the last century demonstrate the mismatch of social expectations and reality that was generally typical for the images of the future. According to the authors of the present article, Solzhenitsyn’s ideas that the revival of spirituality could serve as the basis for the development of economy, that the influence of the Church on the process of socio-economic development would grow, and that the political situation strongly depends on the personal qualities of the leader, are unjustified. Nevertheless, such ideas are still present in many images of the future of Russia, including contemporary ones.


Author(s):  
Anna Bull

Through an ethnographic study of young people playing and singing in classical music ensembles in the south of England, this book analyses why classical music in England is predominantly practiced by white middle-class people. It describes four ‘articulations’ or associations between the middle classes and classical music. Firstly, its repertoire requires formal modes of social organization that can be contrasted with the anti-pretentious, informal, dialogic modes of participation found in many forms of working-class culture. Secondly, its modes of embodiment reproduce classed values such as female respectability. Thirdly, an imaginative dimension of bourgeois selfhood can be read from classical music’s practices. Finally, its aesthetic of detail, precision, and ‘getting it right’ requires a long-term investment that is more possible, and makes more sense, for middle- and upper-class families. Through these arguments, the book reframes existing debates on gender and classical music participation in light of the classed gender identities that the study revealed. Overall, the book suggests that inequalities in cultural production can be understood through examining the practices that are used to create a particular aesthetic. It argues that the ideology of the ‘autonomy’ of classical music from social concerns needs to be examined in historical context as part of the classed legacy of classical music’s past. It describes how the aesthetic of classical music is a mechanism through which the middle classes carry out boundary-drawing around their protected spaces, and within these spaces, young people’s participation in classical music education cultivates a socially valued form of self-hood.


Author(s):  
Martin Loughlin

Institutionalism is a theory that maintains that law is neither norm nor command but institution. It emerges in the late-nineteenth century primarily through the work of Hauriou in France and Romano in Italy. Their innovative studies are shaped by reflecting on the effects of social and economic change on law, which manifests itself primarily in the emergence of administrative law. In this chapter the importance of institutional jurisprudence is assessed by examining its historical context and offering reflections on its continuing significance. It argues that, partly because of the lack of English translations of its leading exponents, institutionalism has been relatively neglected in Anglo-American jurisprudence, and that it continues to offer acute insights into contemporary juristic controversies.


Author(s):  
Georg Menz

The explosive rise in not just public, but also private debt has recently attracted more scholarly attention. This is a novel development and might expose politico-economic models of governance to instability from an angle previously underappreciated. The liberalization of credit access in the Anglo-American countries, and, somewhat later, beyond those, might be seen as liberating for some, but they also create the potential for entrapment in debt. The term ‘privatized Keynesianism’ has been proposed to suggest a systematic agenda behind the facilitated access to lending. In this chapter, the broader access to investment vehicles is also being scrutinized, although upon closer inspection any claims of mass ownership of shares turn out not to be tenable.


2021 ◽  
pp. 263300242110244
Author(s):  
Alice M. Greenwald ◽  
Clifford Chanin ◽  
Henry Rousso ◽  
Michel Wieviorka ◽  
Mohamed-Ali Adraoui

How do societies and states represent the historical, moral, and political weight of the terrorist attacks they have had to face? Having suffered in recent years from numerous terrorist attacks on their soil originating from jihadist movements, and often led by actors who were also their own citizens, France and the United States have set up—or seek to do so—places of memory whose functions, conditions of creation, modes of operation, and nature of the messages sent may vary. Three of the main protagonists and initiators of two museum-memorial projects linked to terrorist attacks have agreed to deliver their visions of the role and of the political, social, and historical context in which these projects have emerged. Allowing to observe similarities and differences between the American and French approach, this interview sheds light on the place of memory and feeling in societies struck by tragic events and seeking to cure their ills through memory and commemoration.


2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (03) ◽  
pp. 463-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth F. Cohen

In the English constitutional tradition, subjecthood has been primarily derived from two circumstances: place of birth and time of birth. People not born in the right place and at the right time are not considered subjects. What political status they hold varies and depends largely on the political history of the territory in which they reside at the exact time of their birth. A genealogy of early modern British subjecthood reveals that law based on dates and temporal durations—what I will call collectivelyjus tempus—creates sovereign boundaries as powerful as territorial borders or bloodlines. This concept has myriad implications for how citizenship comes to be institutionalized in modern politics. In this article, I briefly outline one route through whichjus tempusbecame a constitutive principle within the Anglo-American tradition of citizenship and how this concept works with other principles of membership to create subtle gradations of semi-citizenship beyond the binary of subject and alien. I illustrate two main points aboutjus tempus: first, how specific dates create sovereign boundaries among people and second, how durational time takes on an abstract value in politics that allows certain kinds of attributes, actions, and relationships to be translated into rights-bearing political statuses. I conclude with some remarks about how, once established, the principle ofjus tempusis applied in a diverse array of political contexts.


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