Legal Rhetoric and Cultural Critique: Notes toward Guerrilla Writing

diacritics ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Gutierrez-Jones ◽  
E. D. Hirsch ◽  
Mark Kelman ◽  
Sanford Levinson ◽  
Steven Mailloux ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Legal Rhetoric

Performing States-Of-In-Between: Dogs, Parrots, and Other Humans in Recent Austrian Performances

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-310
Author(s):  
Sabine Wilke
Keyword(s):  
Fine Arts ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Dramatic Effect ◽  
The Past ◽  
Violent Content ◽  
The World ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Recent Developments

Every late spring since 1951, the Wiener Festwochen bring performers from around the world to Vienna for an opportunity to share recent developments in performance styles and present them to a Viennese public that seems to be increasingly open to experimentation. These festival weeks solidify a specific form of Viennese self-understanding and self-representation as a culture that is rooted in performance. This essay seeks to link two recent Austrian performances—one of them was part of the Wiener Festwochen in 2016, the other was staged in downtown Linz during the past few years—to this Austrian and specifically Viennese culture of performance by reading them as contemporary articulations of a tradition of radical performance art that can be traced back to the Viennese Actionism of the sixties and later feminist articulations in the seventies and eighties. They play on the dramatic effect of these actions, specifically their joy in cruelty, chaos, and orgiastic intoxication, by staging regressions and thus making visible what has been dammed up and repressed in contemporary society.1 Just as their historical models, these two performances merge the performing and the fine arts and they highlight provocative, controversial, and, at times, violent content. But they do it in an interspecies context that adds an entire layer of complexity to the project of societal and cultural critique.

The role of pathos: from argumentative responses to feeling and emotions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Short Distance ◽  
Social World ◽  
Legal Rhetoric ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
First Time

Chapter 10 is devoted to the role of emotions or pathos. Pathos was the term ordinarily used to denote the notion of audience. For the first time since Aristotle, emotions receive a full role in a treatise on rhetoric. The responses of the audience are modulated by its emotions. What is their nature and how precisely do they operate? The areas of political and legal rhetoric are examined here in the light of an original view of the theory of distance: values at greater distance become passions at short distance, and this is one of the features which demarcates politics from law. Law and politics are not merely argumentative, nor are they entirely emotional. The norms they codify are often implicit in their shaping of our mutual expectations and behavior in the social world.

Masculinity, Race, and Transculturalism in a Norwegian Context

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stan Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Cultural Performance ◽  
Music Aesthetics ◽  
And Gender

This chapter explores transcultural perspectives on popular music aesthetics and gender in Norway through case studies of male celebrities born around 1980: the duo Madcon, Jarle Bernthoft, Lars Vaular, and Sondre Lerche. The analysis focuses on the practices of self-fashioning a persona in the realm of the popular, involving the aesthetics of masquerade, the ordinary, and escapism. Conceptually, the chapter draws from Bakhtin, Eyerman, Frith, and other influential voices in the literature on cultural performance and identity. The discussion also sheds light on fundamental issues in popular music aesthetics, demonstrating how the musicology of popular music can offer a unique cultural critique of identities that may appear to be “only entertainment” but in fact mediate powerful ideologies.

A screwball property: Love It or List It as postfeminist realty TV

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 543-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean M Bruce
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The Family ◽  
Television Programme ◽  
Family Home ◽  
Screwball Comedy ◽  
Depression Era

This article argues that the property television programme, Love It or List It (2008–), employs conventions from the classic screwball comedy to both consolidate its position within the lucrative realty TV market – especially in response to the recent (2008) recession – and negotiate modern gender dynamics within the home. Its Depression-era (1930s) financial and aesthetic resonances are not incidental. And, as with much contemporary culture, this modern iteration of the screwball comedy is not discretely contained by medium or genre of influence: Love It or List It also borrows flourishes from documentary, tabloid TV, melodrama and the gothic novel. In keeping with its reference to a kind of baseball pitching style that is difficult for hitters to anticipate, the screwball’s tendency to suddenly switch course has been identified as its central means for engaging in cultural critique. Love It or List It as an exemplar of reality TV’s recombinant style is still very much like its cinematic predecessor: it has the adeptness to say many things to many audiences. This article makes no claims for Love It or List It’s progressive politics; rather, as with some classic screwball comedies, it explores the possibility that equivocating, shifting course or otherwise abandoning narrative logic register a profound ambivalence about marriage, coupledom and the family home as sacrosanct loci of modern life.

Russland und das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker im postsowjetischen Raum

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-26
Author(s):  
Johannes Socher
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Legal Rhetoric ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Regional Comparison ◽  
State Practice ◽  
Soviet Space ◽  
The Right ◽  
Fragmentation Of International Law ◽  
Post Soviet Space

As a concept of international law, the right to self-determination is widely renowned for its unclarity. Broadly speaking, one can differentiate between a liberal and a nationalist tradition. In modern international law, the balance between these two opposing traditions is sought in an attempt to contain or ‘domesticate’ the nationalist conception by limiting it to ‘abnormal’ situations, i.e. to colonialism in the sense of ‘alien subjugation, domination and exploitation’. Essentially, this distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ situations has since been the heart of the matter in the legal discourse on the right to self-determination, with the important qualification regarding the need to preserve existing borders. This study situates Russia’s approach to the right to self- determination in that discourse by way of a regional comparison vis-à-vis a ‘western’ or European perspective, and a temporal comparison with the former Soviet doctrine of international law. Against the background of the Soviet Union’s role in the evolution of the right to self-determination, the bulk of the study analyses Russia’s relevant state practice in the post-Soviet space through the prisms of sovereignty, secession, and annexation. Complemented by a review of the Russian scholarship on the topic, it is suggested that Russia’s approach to the right to self-determination may be best understood not only in terms of power politics disguised as legal rhetoric, but can be seen as evidence of traits of a regional (re-)fragmentation of international law.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document