Journal articles on the topic 'Authors, German – 20th century – Political and social views'
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1
Roasto, Margo. "Marksismi retseptsioon ja dogmaatilise marksismi kriitika Eesti alal aastatel 1905–16." Ajalooline Ajakiri. The Estonian Historical Journal 177, no. 3/4 (June 20, 2022): 169–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/aa.2021.3-4.02.
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In Estonian historiography, the revolutionary year of 1905 has been described as a starting point for subsequent political changes in 1917 and 1918. Hence many authors have highlighted the importance of political development that led to the foundation of the first Estonian political parties in 1905. However, the ideological differentiation of Estonian political thought between the revolutionary years of 1905 and 1917 has been studied less. The aim of this article is to analyse the political debates on Marxist theory that took place in the Estonian area of the Baltic provinces from 1905 to 1916.
The leaders of the Estonian socialist movement first became acquainted with Marxist theory through German and Russian socialist literature. Since 1905, various texts by socialist authors were also available to a wider audience in Estonian. First and foremost, the works of German social democrats were published in Estonian. During 1910–14, the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital was translated into Estonian. While it had often previously been argued that socialism benefits all oppressed people, Marxist ideology was now presented as a scientific theory that explained economic development and protected the interests of industrial workers in a class society.
The article claims that during the period from 1905 to 1916, recognised experts on Marxist ideology emerged among Estonian socialists. In addition to Marxist tactics, Estonian socialist authors discussed theoretical issues such as the material conception of history. In these discussions, the personal conflicts between Estonian socialists as well as their ideological disagreements became evident. More broadly, these discussions were shaped by earlier ideological debates among European socialists at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.
The article also argues that during the period considered, several Estonian left-wing thinkers questioned the validity of Marxism. Influenced by Bernstein’s revisionist ideas, these thinkers criticised Marxism as a one-sided and dogmatic ideology. They claimed that Marxism was just another theory with both strengths and weaknesses. However, Estonian social democrats who embraced Marxism as a scientific theory responded to such criticism and defended the materialist view of society.
The debates on Marxist theory considered here provide evidence of the ideological differentiation of Estonian left-wing political thought. From 1905 to 1916, numerous socialist texts in Estonian presented various approaches for understanding Marxist ideology. Thus, one can witness an intensified reception of Marxism in the Estonian area during that period. More specifically, these ideological debates reveal new facets of the political views of Estonian socialists who later affected the course of Estonian history as communist revolutionaries or as members of the Estonian Constituent Assembly.
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Solov’ev, Kirill A. "OLD AXIOMS AND NEW THEOREMS OF RUSSIAN HISTORY. ON THE NEW BOOK BY M.A. DAVYDOV “TEOREMA STOLYPINA” (SPB.: ALETEIYA, 2022. 838 P.)." RSUH/RGGU Bulletin. Series Political Sciences. History. International Relations, no. 2 (2022): 134–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.28995/2073-6339-2022-2-134-141.
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The article deals with the issues that were posed in the latest monograph by M.A. Davydov “Teorema Stolypina”. The book offers a very special, innovative view of the socio-economic processes in Russia in the 19th century. Usually, the authors focus on political, social, financial institutions, government policy and global conjuncture. M.A. Davydov has a very special research “optics”. He analyzes the modernization processes in Russia in the 19th-20th centuries in the context of social thought of that time, the categorical apparatus of Russian intellectuals. It allows the author to imagine an invisible passageway of possibilities in which the government operated until the First Russian Revolution. The traditionalist style of thinking, shared by supporters of various views, was the most important obstacle to dynamic economic development. That circumstance emphasizes the importance of Stolypin’s reforms, which were not a continuation of the previous course, but a direct break with it. The concept presented by the author finally makes it possible to tie together the intellectual, political, and economic processes in Russia on the eve of the great upheavals of the early 20th century
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Suttmeier, Richard P. "Chinese Scientists and Responsibility: Ethical Issues of Human Genetics in Chinese International Contexts. Edited by OLE DÖRING. [Hamburg: Institut für Asienkunde, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Asienkunde, 1999. 257 pp. DM 38.00. ISBN 3-88910-227-1.]." China Quarterly 181 (March 2005): 183–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305741005280104.
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It has been more than 80 years since Chinese intellectuals, struggling with the complexities of “science and philosophy of life,” debated the challenges of finding the moral wisdom needed to apply new scientific knowledge in ethically responsible ways. Could a moral compass be found? Would it be discovered in Chinese culture, or would it come from the West?Advances in science and technology during the course of the 20th century have often outpaced progress in understanding “science and philosophy of life.” Nevertheless, the importance of the ethical dimensions of science and technology has increased in all countries, and there is little doubt that the new technologies of the early 21st century are already bestowing on us new moral conundrums. As advanced technologies and scientific research capabilities diffuse around the world, the ethical traditions which inform moral choice seemingly become more heterogeneous, and the need for reasoned, cross-cultural moral discourse increases. The Institut für Asienkunde in Hamburg is therefore to be congratulated for convening the “First International and Interdisciplinary Symposium on Aspects of Medical Ethics in China,” from which the 15 papers in this volume come.There is no easy way to summarize the diversity of views presented in this provocative conference report. The authors include practising scientists from China and students of bioethics from China, Malaysia, Germany and the United States. But, the theme of eugenics – especially the ways in which advances in human genetics affect our moral stance towards eugenics – link a number of the papers. The atrocities of Nazi Germany strongly condition the views of the Western authors. Reacting, perhaps, to China's 1994 Law on Maternal and Infant Health Care, the latter seem to be urging Chinese researchers, medical practitioners, ethicists and policymakers to take the German experience to heart – even as China embraces the promises of the new genetic technologies. Thus, historian Sheila Faith Weiss' “Prelude to the maelstrom,” an informative account of the origins of Nazi eugenics in the 19th and early 20th-century culture of German medicine, is not so subtly subtitled, “A cautionary tale for contemporary China?” The Chinese authors acknowledge this “cautionary tale,” but also speak to the ethical challenges of new genetic technologies from a tradition with its own understandings of how practical knowledge and moral purpose are related, and how individual and collective well-being are reconciled.
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Tsydene, Shirap Ts. "М. Н. Богданов и Ц. Ж. Жамцарано о развитии капиталистических отношений в бурятском обществе в начале XX в." Монголоведение (Монгол судлал) 13, no. 1 (April 26, 2021): 41–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.22162/2500-1523-2021-1-41-55.
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Introduction. The article considers works by leaders of the Buryat national movement M. N. Bogdanov and Ts. Zh. Zhamtsarano to provide insight into the issue of capitalist relations development in Buryat society during the early 20th century. Goals. The article seeks to determine specific features of the problem formulation thereto traced in studies conducted by the mentioned scholars. The research analyzes articles of M. N. Bogdanov and Ts. Zh. Zhamtsarano published at the beginning of the 20th century. The objectives set in the article are aimed at characterizing the social and political standpoints of M. N. Bogdanov and Ts. Zhamtsarano; revealing their attitudes to the problem of capitalist relations development among the Buryats; exploring general and special points in their reasoning. Conclusions. The study of socioeconomic development of the Buryats, including that of land relations, are associated with the resettlement campaign. Russian historiography notes that the ethnic intelligentsia considered the problem at the stage of the initial accumulation of capital with its inherent social stratification and manufacturing differentiation. It is also clear that the social and political affiliation of the authors had no significant negative impacts on the course of their judgments but did determine the specificities of their views. Despite this, they found common ground in their reasoning for each of the research areas.
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Anan’ev, Denis A. "RUSSIA’S FAR EASTERN POLICY IN THE LATE 19TH — EARLY 20TH CENTURY IN THE WORKS OF THE ENGLISH AND GERMAN-LANGUAGE RESEARCHERS." Ural Historical Journal 73, no. 4 (2021): 97–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.30759/1728-9718-2021-4(73)-97-105.
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The paper analyzes the works of the English- and German-language researchers who studied the history of Russia’s Far Eastern policy at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. According to these scholars, a striking feature of that policy was the inseparability of the foreign and internal political tasks, while its main result was Russia’s involvement in the war against Japan. However, Western authors focused not only on the foreign policy and military aspects of the “Russian eastward expansion” (analyzed by C. von Zepelin, A. Malosemoff, S. Marks, R. Quested, J. Stephan) but also on the geographic, demographic, social and economic aspects (B. Sumner, A. A. Lobanov-Rostovsky, R. Quested, D. Geyer, J. Lensen et al.). The ideological component of the Far Eastern policy (associated with the ideas of Russia’s historical civilizing mission in Asia and the need to oppose the “Yellow Peril”) was considered in the works by A. Malozemoff, D. Schimmelpenninck van der Oye. The economic reasons for the development of the region were discussed by the authors who studied processes of “modernization” and S. Yu. Witte’s policy of “peaceful penetration” (B. Sumner, A. A. Lobanov-Rostovsky, R. Quested, D. Geyer, J. Lensen et al.). Sociocultural processes that led to the formation of “national identity” and “regional identity” were analyzed by J. Stephan, Ch. Y. Hsu, D. Wolff, Sh. Corrado. Despite the diversity of conceptions proposed by the Englsih- and Germanlanguage researchers it is possible to identify the two key trends in the study of the topic. The majority of works emphasized the expansionist intentions of Russia as one of the “imperialist powers” who participated in dividing spheres of influence in the Asia-Pacific region. However, many authors acknowledged Russia’s objective need to strengthen its position on the Pacific frontier, to protect its Far Eastern territories, to settle them and develop their economy.
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Sablin, Ivan D. "Kurt Badt. Verlust der Mitte (On the Question of Modernism and the Anti-modernism in mid-20th Century German Art History)." Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Arts 11, no. 3 (2021): 532–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.21638/spbu15.2021.309.
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On the example of the activities of the German art historian Kurt Badt, the article reveals the complex relationship between modern art and contemporary art history. The outstanding and, obviously, underestimated figure of the scholar, who throughout his long life was ready to confront the rest of the discipline unwilling to become a part of the university system, with all his creativity embodied the very idea of freedom that modern artists and sympathizing art critics strove for. Due to the availability of English-language versions of the art historian’s texts mainly on the masters close to modern art — Delacroix, Constable, and Cézanne — his position in the dispute about modernism seems more or less unambiguous. The aim of this article is to show that this is far from the case, discovering the points of contact of Badt with many of his colleagues who have earned a reputation as unconditional conservatives. First of all, it concerns the Austrian art theorist Hans Sedlmayr, an interest for whom, especially in recent times, is predetermined by widespread ideas about the fundamental incompatibility of academic art history with attempts of unbiased consideration of the history of modern art. Moreover, a deep kinship of such research activity with the most reactionary political ideas is also widely discussed, which, as it should be noted, this outstanding critic of the modern culture was not absolutely innocent of. Nevertheless, his clash with Badt, a polemic that took place in the 1950s and 60s, centered on the work of not Cézanne, but Vermeer van Delft, can be considered from the point of view of the attitude of the two scholars to phenomena less distant in time. This makes it possible to raise the question of the paradoxical similarity of the views of these two authors — with such a different creative and human destiny.
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Özay, Mehmet, and Muhammad Saifuddin. "A Preliminary Discussion on the Notion of Nationalism in Weber’s Thought: Max Weber and His Cogitation of Nationalism." Journal of Humanity and Society (insan & toplum) 12, no. 3 (September 2022): 25–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.12658/m0660.
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Nationalism is known as the product of the continuation of the Enlightenment in Western Europe. Although this ideology has an established place in studies on political science and has been a subject studied by political scientists, discussing whether the founding fathers of sociology had deliberated or not on this would be interesting. Max Weber seems to have developed an interest in the concept of nationalism after getting his professorship in economics. Once nationalism became a mainstream phenomenon among the world communities at the end of 20th century, Weber’s approach evoked interest among social scientists. This paper pays attention to Weber’s discussion of this notion in the context of German nationalism mostly based on the socio-political changes he witnessed. The basic question is what was Weber’s idea about nationalism and its place in his sociological and economic views? This paper tries to answer this question by comparatively going through sources. This preliminary work intends to review the ideas of Weber’s nationalism by engaging in the existing literature which is believed to be meaningful. This article limitedly addresses the reconstruction of Weber’s concept of nationality based on the availability of relevant data by revealing the academic discussion.
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Певзнер, М. Н., Е. В. Иванов, and П. А. Петряков. "The Development of the Idea of Adolescents’ Civic Education and Upbringing in Russian Pedagogy in the Second Half of the 20th Century — Early 21st Century." Психолого-педагогический поиск, no. 4(56) (March 4, 2021): 22–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.37724/rsu.2020.56.4.002.
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Актуальность исследования объясняется потребностью современного общества в выпускниках вузов и школ, обладающих активной гражданской позицией, готовых к взаимодействию гражданского общества и правового государства. Воспитанию молодых людей, обладающих гражданскими качествами и социальной активностью, способствует система гражданского образования, основы которой закладывались в различные исторические периоды отечественной педагогической науки. Целью исследования является выделение и обоснование исторических этапов развития знания о становлении гражданского образования и воспитания в российской педагогической науке во второй половине XX — первые десятилетия XXI века. При проведении исследования использовались следующие методы: проблемно-сравнительный, историко-рефлексивный и системно-структурный анализ, метод систематизации и классификации на основе изучения научных источников, обобщение и синтез. Авторы статьи выдвигают гипотезу о том, что идея о гражданском образовании и воспитании в современных концепциях развивалась и трансформировалась во второй половине XX — первых десятилетий XXI века на различных исторических этапах под влиянием определенных общественно-политических факторов. Научная новизна исследования заключается в выделении и теоретическом обосновании исторических этапов развития знания о гражданском образовании и воспитании на основе разработанных авторами критериев; в определении системы и процесса гражданского образования и воспитания учащейся молодежи. Теоретическая значимость исследования состоит в расширении фонда знаний об особенностях развития идеи о гражданском образовании молодежи на различных исторических этапах с учетом общественно-политических факторов и научно-педагогических взглядов ученых на проблему гражданского образования. Практическая значимость заключается в том, что его результаты могут быть положены в основу проектирования современных концепций и моделей гражданского образования молодежи. В процессе изучения эволюции идеи о гражданском образовании авторами выделены этапы идейно-политического воспитания в русле коммунистической моноидеологии; демократизации и гуманизации образования; гражданско-патриотического воспитания на основе национальных традиций и ценностей. Систематизируя результаты исследования, авторы рассматривают гражданское образование как процесс и систему обучения и воспитания, направленную на формирование у обучающейся молодежи активной гражданской позиции и социальной активности на основе гражданско-правовых знаний и нравственных ценностей. В дальнейшем гражданское образование может быть исследовано как фактор формирования устойчивости молодежи к рискам и вызовам эпохи цифровизации. The relevance of the research is accounted for by the fact that modern society has urgent need for civic-minded school leavers and university graduates, who are ready to cooperate with civil society and constitutional state. The system of civic education, whose foundation has been laid by Russian educators of various historical periods, ensures the development of young people’s civic-mindedness and secures their social participation. The aim of the research is to identify and substantiate historical stages of gathering evidence about the formation of civic education and upbringing in Russian pedagogy in the second half of the 20th century — the first decades of the 21st century. The authors of the article use the following methods of investigation: comparative method, historical reflexivity method, systemic-structural method, method of systematization and classification, source analysis, generalization, synthesis. The authors of the article put forward a hypothesis that modern concepts of civic education and upbringing developed in the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century under the influence of various social and political factors. The novelty of the research consists in an attempt to theoretically substantiate historical stages of gathering evidence and developing knowledge about civic education and upbringing on the basis of criteria developed by the authors. It also consists in an attempt to define the system and the process of civic education and upbringing of students. The research is theoretically significant, for it attempts to expand one’s knowledge about the development of the idea of young people’s civic education taking into consideration social and political factors and scholars’ views on the issue of civic education. The research is practically significant, for its results can be used to create modern concepts and models of young people’s civic education. Investigating the evolution of the ideas about civic education, the authors of the article single out some stages of ideological and political treatment within the framework of communist ideology, democratization, and humanization of education; civic and patriotic education on the basis of traditions and values. The article systematizes the results of the research, the authors treat civic education as a process and a system of education and upbringing which is aimed at the development of students’ civic mindedness and social participation on the basis of their knowledge of laws and their moral values. Civic education can be further investigated as a factor of ensuring young people’s ability to cope with risks and challenges of the digital era.
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PEREDRII, Bohdan. "The hermeneutics of nietzscheanism: an analysis of the diversity of interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy through the prism of the evolution of Ernst Jünger's ideas." Filosofska dumka (Philosophical Thought) -, no. 2 (August 17, 2022): 178–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.15407/fd2022.02.178.
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The essence of Nietzscheanism as a philosophical doctrine has never been characterized by a definite consistency or certainty. Instead "indirect followers" and interpreters of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy (since this thinker did not have direct followers or a particular school) resorted to a variety of interpretations of his concepts. Considering that, the hermeneutic aspect of the study not only of Nietzsche's texts, but also of his interpreters allows us to look at the hidden potential of the concepts of the German philosopher from a new point of view. In this research, we seek to focus on looking for Nietzschean roots in Ernst Jünger's creative legacy, tracing the transformation of his ideas along the author's intellectual path and showing how those ideas correlate with those of Friedrich Nietzsche himself and how they differ. As a reference point for any study of interpretations of Nietzsche's philosophy, the author singles out many German philosopher concepts at the edge of various interpretations. Such central concepts in the article include the idea of "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" principles (the first), the anthropological idea of " Overhuman" and the interrelated metaphysical triad of "will to power," "reevaluation of all values," and "eternal return." In addition, one of the leading motives of the 20th century, which can be traced to an attempt to read Nietzschean ideas, postulates their location at the junction of philosophical and political-ideological concepts. Analyzing the peculiar hermeneutic conflict of Nietzschean philosophy based on this phenomenon, the author turns to early attempts to understand and implement the ideas of the German thinker, which were carried out directly in Germany. This context is connected in the article with the formation of the foundations of the conservative revolution and the figure of Ernst Jünger since the interpretation of this thinker, to some extent, can be considered one of the first and, undoubtedly, the most resonant. In the course of the research, the author turns to Nietzsche's original texts, forming a kind of hermeneutic circle of the author and interpreters, interpreters and the interpreted, ultimately obtaining in this system the opportunity for a thorough and as independent as possible analysis of the original ideas, counting on the probability of reducing the error of one's interpretation due to paying attention to the entire interpretive field texts The considered ideas of Ernst Jünger demonstrate this thesis, expanding the contextual field of the Nietzschean Overman and the metaphysics of the Will to Power and giving these concepts in an interpreted form a particular social dimension along with the philosophical one, which provides a new context for the interpretation of the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche.
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Emel’yanova, Elena N. "The Essence of and Reasons for War in the Social Democratic Thought of the 20th and 21st Centuries." Vestnik of Northern (Arctic) Federal University. Series Humanitarian and Social Sciences 22, no. 5 (December 15, 2022): 16–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.37482/2687-1505-v222.
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This article deals with the problem of war and peace in the works of representatives of the social democratic thought of the 20th and 21st centuries. The focus is on the works of Marxists (K. Kautsky, A. Bebel, R. Luxemburg, F. Mehring, G.V. Plekhanov) and neo-Marxist I. Wallerstein, as well as their opponents: realists (C. von Clausewitz, R. Aron, and others) and supporter of liberal idealism W. Wilson, as well as on some studies of contemporary authors. Much attention is paid to defining the essence of wars, their causes, ways to achieve peace, and ideas about the ideal world order. Further, the evolution of social democratic theory on the issue of war and peace in the 20th century is traced. The views of Marxist theorists are compared with those of representatives of other areas of the science of international relations. It is concluded that socialist theory, which is based on the understanding of the essence of war laid down in the works of the founders of Marxism and has much in common with the realist school, has evolved towards liberalism in matters of peace and post-war world order. At the same time, it made a significant contribution to the theory of international relations and not only became the basis for neo-Marxism, but also enriched political realism and liberalism as well as modern science in general with some conclusions. Works of researchers of the 21st century develop and summarize the most important conclusions on war and peace made by representatives of Marxism and other schools of the theory of international relations, which indicates the aspiration of the world scientific community to solve this global problem through joint efforts.
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Wien, Peter. "COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST: GERMAN ACADEMIA AND HISTORICAL RELATIONS BETWEEN THE ARAB LANDS AND NAZI GERMANY." International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 2 (April 13, 2010): 311–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020743810000073.
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The books that are the subject of this review essay comprise three new contributions and one revised edition about a topic that has become paradigmatic in defining scholarly and political approaches to key areas of Middle Eastern history. It has shaped studies of the historical and ideological roots of Arab nationalism, the Arab–Israeli conflict, and the emergence and perseverance of authoritarian regimes in the modern Middle East. The ways that politicians, intellectuals, political movements, and the Arab public related to Nazism and Nazi anti-Semitism have been used to contest the legitimacy of 20th-century Arab political movements across the ideological spectrum. Historians have theorized about the involvement of individuals such as Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini in the crimes of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Eichmann; the roots of Arab nationalist doctrine in German Volk ideas; the mimicry of Nazism in organizations such as the Iraqi al-Futuwwa and Antun Saadeh's Syrian Social Nationalist Party; and Arab public sympathies for Nazi anti-Semitism dating from the 1930s or even earlier. Until recently, European and Anglo-American research on these topics—often based on a history of ideas approach—tended to take a natural affinity of Arabs toward Nazism for granted. More recent works have contextualized authoritarian and totalitarian trends in the Arab world within a broad political spectrum, choosing subaltern perspectives and privileging the analysis of local voices in the press over colonial archives and the voices of grand theoreticians. The works of Israel Gershoni have taken the lead in this emerging scholarship of Arab nationalism. This approach was also the common denominator of a research project on “Arab Encounters with National Socialism,” which the Berlin Center for Modern Oriental Studies (Zentrum Moderner Orient) hosted from 2000 to 2003. Its members included the author of this review and the authors of two of the books under review (Nordbruch and Wildangel). The project used indigenous Arabic sources, especially local newspapers, for a close scrutiny of Arab reactions to the challenge of Nazism in a period when Arabs, especially nationalists, perceived that quasicolonial regimes undermined the ostensibly democratic and liberal ethos of the British and French Mandate powers.
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Wedekind, Michael. "„Was soll der Mensch da oben?“. Vom politischen Nutzen des Bergerlebnisses." Góry, Literatura, Kultura 12 (August 1, 2019): 55–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.19195/2084-4107.12.5.
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“What does man achieve up there?” On the political use of mountaineering experiencesSince the 1870s the socio-economic and national conflicts with ethnic backgrounds reached the highest Alpine peaks. This was visible in a broad European context, but especially in the Habsburg Monarchy. This was where demands for political participation and social emancipation of allegedly disadvantaged ethnic groups in the Reich were juxtaposed with aggressive German-Austrian strategies seeking to preserve the status quo. In this context, “capturing” and “seizing” highland areas in disputed language border regions of the multi-ethnic empire became terms of huge symbolic and identity-shaping significance.In comparison with the British Alpine Club, whose members were well travelled climbers, Central European Alpine associations were anchored in regional political contexts and had clear nationalistic views. They reflected the specific socio-psychological determinants, moral values and social norms of the bourgeois elites, from among whom the leaders and members of these associations came almost exclusively as late as in the early 20th century. In its early hybrid form — vacillating between sport and science — mountaineering turned out in many respects to be a useful tool of cultural takeover and emotional awareness-raising with regard to one’s own homeland presumed to be threatened by a foreign element; it was useful as a driving force in internalising national identity, social values, political concepts as well as heroic military maxims referring to desirable behaviour. The first ascents of mountain peaks and “capturing” of hitherto untouched highland areas, construction of prestigious hotels and mountain hostels as well as nationally-inspired monuments on mountain peaks became semiotic expressions of territorial aspirations of a nation, a symbolic seizure of the mountains, preventing “ethnically foreign” profanations. Thus emerged a new, collectively binding mental map with sanctified mountain peaks and ranges that were incorporated into the nation’s iconography. The politicisation of mountains and mountain climbing became part of the “nationalisation of the masses.”The author of the article examines these aspects, using the multi-ethnic region of Tyrol as an example. He analyses, first of all, the Società degli Alpinisti Tridentini, an organisation operating in the southern, Italian-speaking part of the country, and its equivalent, the much larger German and Austrian Alpine Club. The analysis features, among others, various ideas of “nature”, “mountains” and climbing, varied goals mountaineers set for themselves, and, finally, the link between socio-economic conflicts with ethnic backgrounds and peaks in the Dolomites and the Ortler. These were conflicts which, in some sense, paved the way for the subsequent fighting during the First World War or, in any case, directly led to it.
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Wedekind, Michael. "„Po co ten człowiek tam na górze?”. O politycznym wykorzystaniu przeżyć górskich." Góry, Literatura, Kultura 12 (August 1, 2019): 69–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.19195/2084-4107.12.6.
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“What does man achieve up there?” On the political use of mountaineering experiencesSince the 1870s the socio-economic and national conflicts with ethnic backgrounds reached the highest Alpine peaks. This was visible in a broad European context, but especially in the Habsburg Monarchy. This was where demands for political participation and social emancipation of allegedly disadvantaged ethnic groups in the Reich were juxtaposed with aggressive German-Austrian strategies seeking to preserve the status quo. In this context, “capturing” and “seizing” highland areas in disputed language border regions of the multi-ethnic empire became terms of huge symbolic and identity-shaping significance.In comparison with the British Alpine Club, whose members were well travelled climbers, Central European Alpine associations were anchored in regional political contexts and had clear nationalistic views. They reflected the specific socio-psychological determinants, moral values and social norms of the bourgeois elites, from among whom the leaders and members of these associations came almost exclusively as late as in the early 20th century. In its early hybrid form — vacillating between sport and science — mountaineering turned out in many respects to be a useful tool of cultural takeover and emotional awareness-raising with regard to one’s own homeland presumed to be threatened by a foreign element; it was useful as a driving force in internalising national identity, social values, political concepts as well as heroic military maxims referring to desirable behaviour. The first ascents of mountain peaks and “capturing” of hitherto untouched highland areas, construction of prestigious hotels and mountain hostels as well as nationally-inspired monuments on mountain peaks became semiotic expressions of territorial aspirations of a nation, a symbolic seizure of the mountains, preventing “ethnically foreign” profanations. Thus emerged a new, collectively binding mental map with sanctified mountain peaks and ranges that were incorporated into the nation’s iconography. The politicisation of mountains and mountain climbing became part of the “nationalisation of the masses.”The author of the article examines these aspects, using the multi-ethnic region of Tyrol as an example. He analyses, first of all, the Società degli Alpinisti Tridentini, an organisation operating in the southern, Italian-speaking part of the country, and its equivalent, the much larger German and Austrian Alpine Club. The analysis features, among others, various ideas of “nature”, “mountains” and climbing, varied goals mountaineers set for themselves, and, finally, the link between socio-economic conflicts with ethnic backgrounds and peaks in the Dolomites and the Ortler. These were conflicts which, in some sense, paved the way for the subsequent fighting during the First World War or, in any case, directly led to it.
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Оліцький, В’ячеслав, and Ігор Карпенко. "THE HISTORY OF THE FORMATION AND COMBAT PATH OF THE UKRAINIAN SELF-DEFENCE LEGION BASED ON THE MEMOIRS OF ITS MEMBERS." КОНСЕНСУС, no. 3 (November 2022): 22–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.31110/consensus/2022-03/022-034.
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The history of wars and military conflicts belongs to the current topics of scientific research in modern historiography. An important place in their study belongs to historical sources, in particular memoirs. This article is devoted to the study of the formation and combat path of the Ukrainian self-defence legion based on the memoirs of its members. It is noted that Ukrainian military memoirs of the Second World War are characterized by the political and ideological views of the authors, in addition to the typical separation of memories according to the social characteristics of the memoirist. It has been established that the concept of Ukrainian military memoirs is quite conditional. According to the authors, the main feature of assigning memories to this type is the presence of the idea of struggle for Ukrainian statehood. The article presents a short historical tour of the Ukrainian self-defence legion, the main focus is on highlighting its combat path based on the memories of the participants. It was noted that the memoirs of the legion members were published abroad, primarily in the countries of North America, given the forced emigration of the authors. The authors elaborated and included in the research the memoirs of O. Horodyskyi, M. Karkots-Vovk and K. Hirniak, published at different times in the second half of the 20th century. It has been established that the authors of memoirs mainly describe events that they directly witnessed. Each of the authors provides a description of the events and draws conclusions not only by observing certain processes, but also expresses his attitude and gives an assessment of the events. At the same time, the value of memoirs has been noted as historical sources containing information that is almost never found in official documents. Among it, first of all, it is worth highlighting everyday aspects, the morale of the military, relations with the command, etc. It has been established that Ukrainian military memoirs dedicated to the Ukrainian self-defence legion not only describe the history of this military formation, but also highlight broader issues of the Second World War. The article notes the need to adhere to a critical analysis of memories, because they contain a significant influence of the authors’ personal experience, and, accordingly, subjective assessments of events and phenomena.
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Osipov, Igor D., and Aleksandr E. Rybas. "The idea of a humane civilisation in the works of representatives of the Leningrad philosophical school." Journal of the Belarusian State University. Sociology, no. 3 (October 12, 2022): 15–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.33581/2521-6821-2022-3-15-22.
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Considering the fact that at present there is a crisis of modernity, which has not only a political but also a socio-cultural character, the authors of the article try to offer a possible way out of it. Namely, they propose to turn to those socio-philosophical ideas that were developed by representatives of the Leningrad philosophical school in the second half of the 20th century and are almost forgotten at this moment. These ideas, understood through the prism of recent events that have shown the precariousness and insecurity of the unipolar world established after the collapse of the Soviet Union, may well be actualised and used to find the right solutions. The article devotes special attention to the analysis of the socio-philosophical views of V. P. Tugarinov, the dean of the department of philosophy of the Leningrad State University from 1951 to 1960, and V. P. Branskiy, one of the most prominent representatives of the Leningrad philosophical school. It is shown that the idea of humane civilisation, which they conceived as the ideal of social development, meets the theoretical and practical demands of the present. The main characteristics of the humane civilisation are as follows: a pluralistic view of the world, man and society, which, providing freedom of thought and action of people, would not lead to the destruction of society, anarchism in public life or relativism in knowledge; proclamation of freedom the highest value of human life and creation of such social institutions that would be able to guarantee the realisation of freedom in practice; ensuring favourable conditions for the maximum development of personality and moral perfection of man; a critique of bourgeois morality and lifestyle, as well as the pseudo-values of capitalist culture; interpretation of socially significant ideals in the context of the dynamics of social life, as necessary elements of historical development, rather than as eternal truths.
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Daugirdaitė, Solveiga. "Žemaitė XX a. II pusės lietuvių poezijoje ir prozoje." Aktuālās problēmas literatūras un kultūras pētniecībā rakstu krājums 27 (March 10, 2022): 105–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.37384/aplkp.2022.27.105.
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The article dedicated to the works of the Lithuanian literature written in the second half of the 20th century depicting the writer Žemaitė (pen name of Julija Beniuševičiūtė-Žymantienė, 1845–1921). This writer was not rejected by the Soviet authorities because of her realistic outline and her democratic political views, the social criticism expressed in her work towards greed, selfishness and clericalism. Lithuanian writers dedicated to her their poetry, fiction, and drama works. However, Soviet writers were also impressed by Žemaitė’s personality traits, which mentioned less frequently in public: independence, perseverance, wit, the courage to stand out from her surroundings and to disregard the societal norms that stifled older women in traditional society. The article analyses the features of Žemaitė’s personality in works of Lithuanian literature created by poets Salomėja Nėris, Judita Vaičiūnaitė, and others. The author reveals how different aspects of Žemaitė’s work and personality were emphasised depending on the time of writing. This change partly reflects the shift of literature from socialist realism to more modern literature. Among the works of prose, the author singles out Bitė Vilimaitė’s cycle of short stories “Apsakymai apie Žemaitę” (Short Stories about Žemaitė) from her collection Papartynų saulė (Fernery Sun, 2002). The stories reveal both the character of Žemaitė, her environment and people close to her, and the most important features of Vilimaitė’s own work: attention to a woman’s fate, subtle psychological insight, attention to detail, and a specific model of a short novella. Since the protagonists of the cycle are usually real people, Vilimaitė’s talent for using documentary material and combining it with fiction is also evident here. The article concludes that Soviet-era authors portraying Žemaitė’s character raised aspects relevant to the time of writing, such as the promotion of national culture, problems of women’s emancipation and, also the fact that for female writers, Žemaitė was a role model.
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Plath, Ulrike, Elle-Mari Talivee, Kadri Tüür, and Aet Annist. "Loodusmõttest aktivismini: saateks keskkondluse erinumbrile / From Nature Contemplation to Activism: A Special Issue on Environmentalism." Methis. Studia humaniora Estonica 24, no. 30 (December 13, 2022): 5–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.7592/methis.v24i30.22100.
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The introduction to the special issue of Methis on Estonian environmentalism provides an overview of the phenomenon of environmentalism and its spread across political periods, economic formations, and regions. The essay starts by contextualising the central concepts of the issue, ‘environmentalism’ and its possible translation into Estonian as ‘keskkondlus’, and its relationship with the concept of ‘nature’. At the end of the 1980s, amidst a deepening awareness of environmental crisis, some authors announced ‘nature’ to have met its end. While this end has become widely accepted within environmental discourse, the approach clashes with the traditional thinking about the beauty of nature and its strong bonds with national identities. To foster discussion and to bridge the discursive and ideological gap between the two perceptions, the authors of the articles use the concept as an umbrella term for both paradigms.
The second part of the introductory article discusses East European environmentalism, drawing attention to the research into erroneous assumptions regarding the lack of environmental activism within the Soviet Union. Before its brief heyday in the 1980s, East European environmentalism was hidden within economy, policy, society and culture. However, its roots went deeper, reaching back to 18th- and 19th-century thought, to Baltic German – and later Estonian – early voluntary associations and the value seen in the homeland and its natural objects. The founding of animal and nature protection societies in the late 19th century was an early practical outcome, and similar thought became pronounced in print culture. In early 20th century, several nature protection areas were established, and people became avid consumers of popular science journals – an interest that would continue throughout the Soviet period. The 1970s saw an environmental movement to protect the wetlands of Estonia which were in danger of being drained. Throughout the 20th century, also fiction reflected the prevailing views of nature and emerging concerns about the environment.
The issue’s opening article by Ulrike Plath and Kaarel Vanamölder takes us back to the 17th century to demonstrate the possibility of climate movements more than three centuries ago. This is followed by Karl Hein’s case study that depicts in detail the emergence of animal protection in Estonia a hundred years ago in the context of local and regional history. The next four articles focus on different aspects of environmental movements in the Soviet period. Elle-Mari Talivee retells the story of the peculiar character of Atom-Boy created by the childrens’ author Vladimir Beekman who depicts in this form the various developments in the Soviet nuclear industry. This example from children’s literature is paralleled by similar environmental concerns expressed in visual arts, as outlined in Linda Kaljundi’s article. In a more theoretical take on liberal and autocratic environmental protection, Viktor Pál discusses the Soviet propagandistic use of environmental issues. Olev Liivik contextualises the protests against phosphorite mining in the 1970–80s within the wider trends in the Soviet Union, including the practice of sending letters of complaint to the media, and the various waves of environmental dissent. The discussion of a more compact case of the so-called Green Cycling Tours by Tambet Muide demonstrates the same increasingly oppositional stance that took hold in the 1980s. Regarding the post-Soviet era, Tõnno Jonuks, Lona Päll, Atko Remmel and Ulla Kadakas analyse the various conflicts that have emerged around natural and cultural objects protected by law since the 1990s. In the freestanding article of the issue, Raili Lass writes on interlinguistic and intersemiotic procedures of translation in the theatre but, as our introductory essay suggests, points of convergence may be found here with the discussion of staging of conflicts in environmental protection. In the “Theory in Translation” section Timothy Morton’s classic discussion of environmentalism is published in Ene-Reet Soovik’s translation, accompanied by introductory remarks from the translator and Kadri Tüür.
The final part of the issue’s introduction offers a comparative and interdisciplinary take on the themes discussed. The revelatory nature of historical events of any era, especially natural disasters or the conditions of their unfolding, uncovers the socio-environmental relations that push people to respond. Whether or not such responses become environmental movements depends on the context that either recognises or ignores human embeddedness in the environment. Searching for such parallels connects 21st century climate activism and 17th century upheavals, animal protection in the 1920s and a hundred years later. The Soviet period allows a simultaneous scrutiny of both the limited and ideological take on the apparent lack of Soviet environmentalism as well as the methodological challenges of finding the footprints of hidden awareness and activism. Unearthing this from literature, art and the restrained presence of expert voices also provides an explanation to the sudden explosion of activism in the 1980s. The silence of the next decades further proves that there is nothing obvious in the ways in which environmentalism can take hold of society, which demands precise and detailed inquiry such as provided by the authors of this special issue.
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Čović, Sara, and Ivan Puzek. "Validacija skale kozmopolitizma: empirijska verifikacija konceptualnog okvira kulturnoga kozmopolitizma." Migracijske i etničke teme / Migration and Ethnic Themes 37, no. 2 (2021): 147–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.11567/met.37.2.2.
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In the broadest sense, cosmopolitanism can be described as a belief and action in accordance with the view that all human beings belong to a unique world political community. However, such a simplified definition overlooks the multidimensionality of the concept. The term cosmopolitanism has been present in public discourse since ancient times and has carried different connotations throughout history, which contributes to its ambiguity. The preconditions for the development of cosmopolitanism in its present sense arose in the mid-20th century, after the world wars and the onset of new globalisation processes. Within the social sciences, a significant interest in a more specific definition and conceptualisation of cosmopolitanism emerged in the second half of the 20th century. However, numerous theoretical discussions since then have not yet offered such a definition of the concept. An additional problem lies in the fact that those theoretical discussions, which defined multiple aspects and types of cosmopolitanism, are not accompanied by a corresponding number of empirical research. By considering previous theoretical and empirical research on the topic, this paper aims to offer a clearer conceptualisation and operationalisation of cosmopolitanism, with the focus on constructing a valid instrument for its measurement. While it is difficult to offer a clear and unambiguous theoretical definition of cosmopolitanism, most researchers have moved in the direction of a clearer definition of certain aspects of the concept. There were a few attempts of such conceptualisation that have been met with wider acclamation, some of which were more complex and some simpler. Vertovec and Cohen (2002) established the most sophisticated conceptualisation by defining cosmopolitanism as a sociocultural condition, a philosophy or worldview, a political project, an attitude or disposition, and a practice or competence. With the aim of capturing multiple aspects of the concept, Boucher, Aubert and de Latour (2019) defined four types of cosmopolitanism: moral, institutional, civil and cultural. Furthermore, Delanty (2009) offered a different approach by distinguishing moral, political and cultural cosmopolitanism. The various definitions agree, however, on including the political and the cultural aspects of cosmopolitanism. Therefore, this paper is based on the robust typology offered by Hannerz (2006), which distinguishes between the cultural and political faces of cosmopolitanism. The author sees the political face of the concept as the one that tries to solve macro problems of human, economic, legal, environmental and other processes that transcend nation-state borders. Hannerz (2006) defines the cultural face as an identity characteristic of individuals who enjoy new cultures, people, tastes, sounds and the like. The cultural dimension of cosmopolitanism, which arises from the awareness and practices of individuals, is the focus of this research. It is important to mention that numerous researchers define certain types (banal, patriotic, thin, ordinary) of cosmopolitanism. However, it is questionable to what extent the determination of such types contributes to a clearer understanding of the concept, especially when they are defined solely on the basis of theoretical considerations. Before establishing the framework for the empirical research, it was important to clarify the source of contemporary cosmopolitanism. Most researchers link cosmopolitanism to globalisation processes. Beck and Sznaider (2010) explain globalisation as processes that take place “out there” in the world and define cosmopolitanism as “globalization from within”, a process that is closely related to globalisation but takes place within society. Such a connection becomes questionable when the terms glocalisation, which includes micro as well as macro processes, and segmented globalisation, which refers to the different dynamics by which globalisation occurs in places around the world, are introduced into the discourse. These concepts also suggest that all individuals involved in globalisation trends will express cosmopolitan views, which is not the case. On the other hand, Roudometof (2005) emphasises the link between cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, a view that is elaborated in this paper. The author defines the concept of transnationalism as a social condition that arises in the stage of internal globalisation and is not influenced by the emotions and attitudes of individuals but its most important feature is that it can stimulate individuals to develop an open attitude, that is, cosmopolitanism, or a defensive attitude towards differences. The lack of a clear theoretical definition of cosmopolitanism has influenced the disproportion between the theoretical considerations and empirical research of the concept. One part of the researchers used secondary data to examine attitudes about cosmopolitanism in a certain population. These studies have led to important insights, but they have not contributed to the creation of a valid and reliable instrument for measuring cosmopolitanism. Another problem with such research is that it is conducted using data that are focused on examining other concepts. One such example is the study by Olofsson and Öhman (2007), where the authors interpreted views contrary to nationalism as cosmopolitan views. The other part of empirical research on the subject of cosmopolitanism is focused on constructing an instrument for its measurement. While most such studies were conducted to explore a particular aspect of the concept, Saran and Kalliny (2012) offered an instrument to measure general cosmopolitan attitudes, values, and practices within a particular population. The authors first conducted interviews, the results of which were used to construct questions for the survey. After collecting survey data, the authors defined a valid and reliable, one-dimensional 14-item scale of cosmopolitanism by conducting exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The findings of other authors pointed to the connection between cosmopolitanism and other concepts like transnational experiences, political orientation, and sociodemographic characteristics. The empirical part of this research aimed to define a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the presence of cosmopolitanism in a given population. For this purpose, the scale offered by Saran and Kalliny (2012) was used in a slightly modified form to further test its construct validity, reliability and applicability. The instrument was tested on the student population of the University of Zadar via an online survey in October 2020. In addition to the cosmopolitanism scale, the questionnaire contained questions about the number of countries the respondents had visited, the number of foreign languages they spoke, their political orientation, their support for general human rights and certain sociodemographic characteristics, with the purpose of testing the convergent validity of the instrument. In order to determine the metrics of the cosmopolitanism scale, bivariate (correlation analysis) and multivariate statistical procedures (exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and multiple regression analysis) were conducted in the statistical programming language R. First, exploratory factor analysis was performed on the cosmopolitanism scale with parallel analysis as a factor retention method, which extracted one 13-item factor with a high level of reliability (α=0.93). To examine the construct validity of the scale, confirmatory factor analysis was further performed, resulting in an acceptable goodness-of-fit. In order to define a scale that shows even better psychometric properties, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on a reduced 6-item scale that Saran and Kalliny (2012) found to show stronger construct validity. Following their results, the 6-item scale showed even better goodness-of-fit (χ²=25, df=9, SRMR=0.05, RMSEA=0.09, CFI=0.95, TLI=0.91), and its factor scores were used in further analyses. Correlation analysis was used to measure the relationship between the cosmopolitanism scale and transnational experiences and political views. It was found that respondents who express stronger cosmopolitan views speak more foreign languages, have visited a greater number of foreign countries, express stronger support for leftwing political options, and a stronger need to protect universal human rights, of which the latter correlation proved to be the highest. Lastly, multiple regression was conducted, where the cosmopolitanism scale factor scores served as the dependent variable and sociodemographic variables as predictors. The regression model confirmed the previous finding that women express stronger cosmopolitan attitudes than men. The results of the statistical analysis indicate a high level of reliability and validity of the reduced 6-item cosmopolitanism scale. On that basis, it can be stated that the scale serves as a valid instrument for measuring cosmopolitan attitudes within a population. The scope of the study is limited because it was conducted on a relatively homogeneous sample of the University of Zadar student population. In future research, the 6-item scale should be tested on a more heterogeneous sample which could indicate the applicability of the instrument to a wider population. Besides, in future research, it would be advisable to pay more attention to examining indicators and constructs related to cosmopolitanism, based on which clearer types of cosmopolitan could potentially be defined.
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Barevičiūtė, Jovilė. "Editorial. Dialogue, Communication and Collaboration: Aspects of Philosophy and Communication." Coactivity: Philosophy, Communication 24, no. 1 (March 31, 2016): 1–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.3846/cpc.2016.246.
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Acting as a usual means of everyday communication and collaboration, dialogue is also a fundamental mode of human presence in the world. It is innate and, therefore, feels organic to people. Nothing but a dialogue determines and defines the inborn human potential of reflexivity, empathy and communitivity. Naturally, it is hardly surprising that as a phenomenon, a dialogue constantly fell within the purview of most prominent European thinkers and throughout different historical epochs, in the spaces of philosophy and communication, it unfolded in a diverse and multidimensional manner. Ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote in the form of dialogue, this way opening the possibility to a reader to learn about the world and the order of things as well as defining a certain relationship between the perceiving subject and the perceivable object. In the early Middle Ages, writings of Saint Augustine encouraged people to immerse into themselves and start a conversation with God, which established a certain living relationship between spaces empirical and transcendental. Much later, towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, who developed the theory of the intentionality of the consciousness, perceived that no living relationship between people is feasible without intersubjectivity. In this case, the communication is conditioned on the focus of at least two subjects on a certain object. This object, in particular, ensures the potential of the meaning, content and the purpose of communication. Another German author Martin Buber treated the dialogue as a phenomenon, in which an individual establishes a personal relationship with the Christian God, and this gives rise to a certain immediacy: a confrontation with the Ruler of the Kingdom of Heaven gives meaning to all the other interpersonal relationships. These are but few different philosophical interpretations of dialogue as a phenomenon. The universe of issues related to dialogue emerges from thinking perspectives of philosophers as well as communication theorists. On the one hand, the perspective of communication trivializes the phenomenon of dialogue, depriving it of its depth and profoundness; and on the other hand, it defines and specifies the concept of dialogue, assigning to it a form or function. This issue of the journal is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon of dialogue both in the fields of philosophy and communication, inquiring into different contexts of its development. In her article Communication Solutions by Improving Interactive Art Projects, Gintarė Vainalavičiūtė analyses the relationship between visual arts and contemporary technologies, which determines both the rise of the forms of dialogue and non-traditional understanding of works of art. Mindaugas Stoškus contributed an article entitled Disciplines of Political Philosophy and Political Science: Antagonism, Cooperation or Indifference? in which he investigates the relationship between these two disciplines, conditions and problems pertaining to their dialogue, and the particularly intensified dynamics of the dialogue in the fifties of the 20th century. In their article Online Artistic Activism: Case-Study of Hungarian-Romanian Intercultural Communication, Gizela Horváth and Rozália Klára Bakó delve into the interactive relationship between works of art and their perceiver, as these works of art send messages via the social media environment. Moral Perception, Cognition, and Dialogue is an article authored by Vojko Strahovnik, in which he examines the causes for the rise of cases that hinder intercommunication and mutual understanding, such as disagreement, intercultural dialogues, etc. Problems of visual communication and the specificity of visual languages, bringing together subjects into dialogue are discussed by Arto Mutanen in his article Relativity of Visual Communication. Another article entitled Scientific Realism versus Antirealism in Science Education is a contribution by Seungbae Park, in which he attempts to define how the dialogue between teachers and students is possible, as he takes the position stating that the doctrine of scientific realism is much more effective than provided opportunities of scientific antirealism. And finally, Algis Mickūnas, in his article The Different Other and Dialogue, discusses the reasons why members of different communities find it difficult to establish dialogue-based relationships and why in some cases they remain imprisoned in the state of a monologue. This issue of the journal presents a truly wide field of investigations into opportunities and obstacles for communication, interaction and collaboration. It is pleasing to see that representatives of various humanities and social sciences joined the same dialogue. Looking forward to the productive insights in the future, the Editor would like to express her gratitude to the authors of this issue.
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Klabbers, Jan HG. "On the Architecture of Game Science: A Rebuttal." Simulation & Gaming 49, no. 3 (May 31, 2018): 356–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1046878118779706.
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Background. Game studies offer a cross-disciplinary image that includes a range of professions. Game science is responsive to the needs of government institutions, to industry, and to individuals vis-à-vis institutions. That pragmatism makes the field issue-oriented, representing a post-normal science approach in a context of political pressure, values in dispute, high decision stakes and high epistemological and ethical systems uncertainties. The body of knowledge is not yet in the form of a cohesive structure: a game science paradigm. Thematic diversity, theoretical and methodological pluralism, and a strong focus on the instrumentality of games are weak credentials within academia, arranged according to analytical science (normal science) principles. Moreover, within the conventional academic settings, game science faces serious limitations, due to the fragmented positioning in different departments and faculties. Aim. A comprehensive and coherent view on game science is needed that connects three levels of inquiry: the philosophy of science level, the science level, and the application level. Based on radical developments during the early 20th century, physicists are introducing doubt, uncertainty, undecidability and imprecision into the world of physics. These advances have impacted on the philosophy of science, on modernism and postmodernism, and as a consequence, on game science. Being able to understand the current position of game science requires that we are aware of its scientific roots, and future options for research and professional practice. Method. Raising a debate among peers, addressing the questions and frame-of-reference presented in the introductory paper “On the architecture of game science”. Results. Referring to the frame of reference, offered by the introductory paper ( Klabbers, 2018 ), the authors have presented five very interesting articles addressing their varying views on, and approaches to game science. Their contributions range from the linkages between game science and complex social systems, to gamification science, and game studies, focusing on the ludosphere, the realm of digital games. Combined, all papers present a comprehensive overview of the field, covering game science and its application levels, with special attention to the varying design and research methodologies and practices. They mention linkages with the philosophy of science level, however refrain to work out their implications for designing, facilitating, and debriefing games. This shortcoming leaves little room for reflecting on the unique role of the players, their explicit knowledge and tacit knowing included, and omits important epistemological questions, raised in Table 1 ( Klabbers, 2018 ), which relate to the triple hermeneutic: the players’ reality created during game play. Conclusion. The collected papers offer a challenging overview of the current state of the art, craft, and science, and a good understanding of important questions that are on the minds of the authors. Together, they present a stimulating platform for a lively debate, and a good basis for advancing game science, more particularly, the connected philosophy of science, science, and practical levels. For the following reason, further research is needed and highly recommended.
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Mazurczak, Urszula. "Panorama Konstantynopola w Liber chronicarum Hartmanna Schedla (1493). Miasto idealne – memoria chrześcijaństwa." Vox Patrum 70 (December 12, 2018): 499–525. http://dx.doi.org/10.31743/vp.3219.
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The historical research of the illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle [Schedelsche Weltchronik (English: Schedel’s World Chronicle)] of Hartmann Schedel comprises the complex historical knowledge about numerous woodcuts which present views of various cities important in the world’s history, e.g. Jerusalem, Constantinople, or the European ones such as: Rome, some Italian, German or Polish cities e.g. Wrocław and Cracow; some Hungarian and some Czech Republic cities. Researchers have made a serious study to recognize certain constructions in the woodcuts; they indicated the conservative and contractual architecture, the existing places and the unrealistic (non-existent) places. The results show that there is a common detail in all the views – the defensive wall round each of the described cities. However, in reality, it may not have existed in some cities during the lifetime of the authors of the woodcuts. As for some further details: behind the walls we can see feudal castles on the hills shown as strongholds. Within the defensive walls there are numerous buildings with many towers typical for the Middle Ages and true-to-life in certain ways of building the cities. Schematically drawn buildings surrounded by the ring of defensive walls indicate that the author used certain patterns based on the previously created panoramic views. This article is an attempt of making analogical comparisons of the cities in medieval painting. The Author of the article presents Roman mosaics and the miniature painting e.g. the ones created in the scriptorium in Reichenau. Since the beginning of 14th century Italian painters such as: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Giotto di Bondone, Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted parts of the cities or the entire monumental panoramas in various compositions and with various meanings. One defining rule in this painting concerned the definitions of the cities given by Saint Isidore of Seville, based on the rules which he knew from the antique tradition. These are: urbs – the cities full of architecture and buildings but uninhabited or civita – the city, the living space of the human life, build-up space, engaged according to the law, kind of work and social hierarchy. The tradition of both ways of describing the city is rooted in Italy. This article indicates the particular meaning of Italian painting in distributing the image of the city – as the votive offering. The research conducted by Chiara Frugoni and others indicated the meaning of the city images in the painting of various forms of panegyrics created in high praise of cities, known as laude (Lat.). We can find the examples of them rooted in the Roman tradition of mosaics, e.g. in San Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. They present both palatium and civitas. The medieval Italian painting, especially the panel painting, presents the city structure models which are uninhabited and deprived of any signs of everyday life. The models of cities – urbs, are presented as votive offerings devoted to their patron saints, especially to Virgin Mary. The city shaped as oval or sinusoidal rings surrounded by the defensive walls resembled a container filled with buildings. Only few of them reflected the existing cities and could mainly be identified thanks to the inscriptions. The most characteristic examples were: the fresco of Taddeo di Bartolo in Palazzo Publico in Siena, which presented the Dominican Order friar Ambrogio Sansedoni holding the model of his city – Siena, with its most recognizable building - the Cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of Mary. The same painter, referred to as the master painter of the views of the cities as the votive offerings, painted the Saint Antilla with the model of Montepulciano in the painting from 1401 for the Cathedral devoted to the Assumption of Mary in Montepulciano. In the painting made by T. di Bartolo, the bishop of the city of Gimignano, Saint Gimignano, presents the city in the shape of a round lens surrounded by defence walls with numerous church towers and the feudal headquarters characteristic for the city. His dummer of the city is pyramidally-structured, the hills are mounted on the steep slopes reflecting the analogy to the topography of the city. We can also find the texts of songs, laude (Lat.) and panegyrics created in honour of the cities and their rulers, e.g. the texts in honour of Milan, Bonvesin for La Riva, known in Europe at that time. The city – Arcadia (utopia) in the modern style. Hartman Schedel, as a bibliophile and a scholar, knew the texts of medieval writers and Italian art but, as an ambitious humanist, he could not disregard the latest, contemporary trends of Renaissance which were coming from Nuremberg and from Italian cities. The views of Arcadia – the utopian city, were rapidly developing, as they were of great importance for the rich recipient in the beginning of the modern era overwhelmed by the early capitalism. It was then when the two opposites were combined – the shepherd and the knight, the Greek Arcadia with the medieval city. The reception of Virgil’s Arcadia in the medieval literature and art was being developed again in the elite circles at the end of 15th century. The cultural meaning of the historical loci, the Greek places of the ancient history and the memory of Christianity constituted the essence of historicism in the Renaissance at the courts of the Comnenos and of the Palaiologos dynasty, which inspired the Renaissance of the Latin culture circle. The pastoral idleness concept came from Venice where Virgil’s books were published in print in 1470, the books of Ovid: Fasti and Metamorphoses were published in 1497 and Sannazaro’s Arcadia was published in 1502, previously distributed in his handwriting since 1480. Literature topics presented the historical works as memoria, both ancient and Christian, composed into the images. The city maps drawn by Hartmann Schedel, the doctor and humanist from Nurnberg, refer to the medieval images of urbs, the woodcuts with the cities, known to the author from the Italian painting of the greatest masters of the Trecenta period. As a humanist he knew the literature of the Renaissance of Florence and Venice with the Arcadian themes of both the Greek and the Roman tradition. The view of Constantinople in the context of the contemporary political situation, is presented in a series of monuments of architecture, with columns and defensive walls, which reminded of the history of the city from its greatest time of Constantine the Great, Justinian I and the Comnenus dynasty. Schedel’s work of art is the sum of the knowledge written down or painted. It is also the result of the experiments of new technology. It is possible that Schedel was inspired by the hymns, laude, written by Psellos in honour of Constantinople in his elaborate ecphrases as the panegyrics for the rulers of the Greek dynasty – the Macedonians. Already in that time, the Greek ideal of beauty was reborn, both in literature and in fine arts. The illustrated History of the World presented in Schedel’s woodcuts is given to the recipients who are educated and to those who are anonymous, in the spirit of the new anthropology. It results from the nature of the woodcut reproduction, that is from the way of copying the same images. The artist must have strived to gain the recipients for his works as the woodcuts were created both in Latin and in German. The collected views were supposed to transfer historical, biblical and mythological knowledge in the new way of communication.
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Hula, Yevhen, and Alla Osadcha. "Features of the impact of design on the progress of humanity." Aspects of Historical Musicology 21, no. 21 (March 10, 2020): 8–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.34064/khnum2-21.01.
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Background. Within the framework of art-historical discourse, the peculiarities of the influence of design developments and concepts on progress of humanity are considered. Researchers offer ambiguous estimates of this phenomenon, discussions are lasting and different opinions on the issues of influence of design on technological and cultural progress of human society are putting forward. The aim of the paper is to systematize and generalize scientific concepts about the design role in the society progress. Novelty of the research consisting in synthesis of information on features of development of design for the last years in various spheres of culture and social practice defines its practical significance: the Ukrainian educators and art critics can consider the information contained in the article useful to develop new strategy of training in bases of design to non-specialist students. Methodology. Major publications and monographs on the subject have been reviewed. It has been found that terminological judgment of design began with the middle of the XX century, first, within postmodern paradigm. The design as a component of culture correlates with cultural and art traditions, philosophy, ecology and other areas of public and humanitarian knowledge. Hence, the study of the role of design in ensuring progress provides for the wide use of theoretical and methodological tools not only of design theory, but also of other disciplines: art history, cultural studies, social psychology, aesthetics, ecology, etc. The design is considered both as universal and as a national phenomenon. The definitions of design in the works of a number of domestic and foreign authors in the context of its cultural-creative influence are compared. The analysis of design in its connection with artistic creativity is carried out. The components of contemporary design art are determined, the characteristic to the newest manifestations of design is given. Results. The design represents the hierarchical structure expressed by means of а material, space and balance of proportions, contrasts, repetitions (in ornaments, etc.), scale and a form, a size, a color and density, texture and weight, and other. It is possible to consider culture of design as the huge multilayered text, which is written down by different ways in different spheres of culture and art. However the dilemma “art or production” in the sphere of design is inevitable. Design is directly involved in technical progress in material culture and uses the art of planning, invention, modeling as a method, also introducing new object forms (see, for example, Vershinin & Melentyev, 2005: 1001). The design role in culture is connected with creation of esthetically perfect fine environment. At the same time, it is differentiated essentially depending on the region of the world. So, design creativity is reasonably considered a manifestation of project activities and project culture of the 20th century. However, the progressive function of design at the beginning of the 21st century is that design is becoming a way to bridge the gap between technical civilization and spiritual culture, and design projecting is becoming a way of harmonizing human life in a modern environment. The importance of design for the progress of humankind is clearly demonstrated by the modern ecological direction, one of the components of the international movement of “green” design, namely, “environmental” design. This concept implies the creation of products that are compatible with the environment, the reduction and complete elimination of the negative impact on nature through the use of alternative resources and energy, as well as non-toxic materials. Ideally, the design should be in line with the “3R” ecological principle: reduce, reuse, and recycle. The value of design for progress in art can be understood, having only tracked integration of painting, architecture, industrial and graphic design and having seen what the role in tangled process of creation of design is played by contents and a form, which also are the expression of the thought, the point of view and social responsibility of the designers. It is also important to emphasize the role of the designer’s profession, because for many artists design and art is a cultural mission, where life and work are inseparable. Judgments of design in art are formed, proceeding from two types of estimates: symbolical, or associative (external), and formal (internal). Symbolical estimates are mostly subjective and have no relation to design or art per se, being most often based on a habit, rumors, others thought, personal factors, prejudices, misunderstanding, that is on social, psychological, political, financial and even religious factors. Internal assessments concern an esthetics and actually design (appearance of the work of art, its visual quality) regardless of what it personifies. If external estimates belong to contents, then internal – to beauty. The latter is difficult to measure it and here such factors as talent, erudition, taste, susceptibility, experience and visual feeling matter. When determining a role of design in art, it is also necessary to remember that the principles of laconicism, laws of color, a rhythm and even plot equally work in any material, these fundamentals exist out of time, space, the state, school or style. To resume, human progress is largely driven by the positive influences of design concepts. Summarizing the views of Ukrainian and foreign researchers, it can be argued that design as a type of purposeful creative activity of mankind contributes to progress, since: 1) provides support for the development of civilization by creating new and improving known man-made objects; 2) creates an optimal human environment in order to achieve maximum comfort of his existence; 3) contributes to the formation of creative personality traits, its purposeful activity, which is one of the main social tasks. Design acts as an universal phenomenon, which covers different spheres of human activity, being, at the same time, the factor of socio-cultural communication and the basis for personality realization. As the socio-cultural phenomenon, it correlates with understanding of the person as source of intrinsic forces acting like the harmony catalyst in space.
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Griškaitė, Reda. "Teodoro Narbuto mokslinė korespondencija kaip veikalo Dzieje narodu litewskiego „akademiškumo“ liudijimas." Archivum Lithuanicum, no. 23 (December 31, 2021): 191–268. http://dx.doi.org/10.33918/26692449-23007.
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TEODOR NARBUTT’S SCIENTIFIC CORRESPONDENCE AS TESTIMONY TO THE ‘ACADEMIC’ NATURE OF DZIEJE NARODU LITEWSKIEGO S u m m a r y The critique of Dzieje narodu litewskiego (The History of the Lithuanian Nation 1–9, Vilnius, 1835–1841, [DNL]) had always made Teodor vel Teodor Mateusz Narbutt (vel O styk-Narbutt,1784–1864) argue that he was not a layman nor a wilful forger. His own approach to defending himself against the attack was unique: he prepared a second edition of DNL and the so-called New Mythology – Mytologija Litewska ze sczegółami do wiary, obyczajów i oświaty przedchrześciańskiej Narodu litewskiego odnoszącemi się (Lithuanian Mythology with Details about the Belief, Customs, and pre-Christianity Education of the Lithuanian Enlightenment, 1848), intended to publish the collection of sources of Lithuanian history kept at his manor in Szawry (Lith. Šiauriai; Grodno Governorate, as of 1843 Vilnius Governorate, Lida Region), and finally, as proof of his honest work, pieced together his scientific correspondence – the letters from scholars, old collectors, and other citizens that cared for Lithuania’s past. Today, this collection that Narbutt made himself – Korrespondencya Uczona (Scientific Correspondence [KU]) is kept at the Manuscript Department of the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Science (LMAVB : f. 18 [Manuscript collection B4], b. 185/2–185/16, 25r–791v). Narbutt’s peculiar method of defence bore an ad te ipsum character; however yet, due to historic circumstances (the sequestration of the Szawry manor, the seizure of the library and its transfer to the public library of Vilnius), originally designed as a tool of self-reflection, the collection became accessible to the public. And researchers dug into letters addressed to Narbutt with much gusto indeed. Nonetheless, the real attention grabbers were the celebrity names in this collection. Hence, just like the printed work of this historian, his handwritten legacy (in this case, correspondence), too, would often merit a fragmented read, which was largely due to its tremendous volume. For instance, DNL has 5,220 pages, KU 766 archival pages – a total of 1,532 pages recto and verso. In other words, letters to Narbutt were never approached in corpore, as an intentionally built collection with an incredibly bright idea and purpose. The idea that the appearance of this epistolary compendium had been inspired by autograph-hunting, a hot trend at thetime, should be disregarded straight away, because not every one of Narbutt’s correspondents was a celebrity. With a few exceptions, their overarching trait was intellectual work and love of Lithuanian antiques. The goal of the article was to approach the collection of letters to Narbutt as a whole, as a means of self-reflection a unique weapon of defence. Narbutt’s epistolary collection had never been dissected from any of these angles. The research has showed that today, KU consists of 386 letters. It is correspondence in Polish, German, Russian, and French (in the order of appearance) written in 1808–1858 (4 letters are not dated). Of the authors of the letters, 68 are men, 3 are women. The social picture of KU is very colourful: from gymnasium students to civil governors, from clergy to members of governorate statistical committees. Still, most of Narbutt’s correspondents were historians, archivists, and litterateurs. Some of the authors were litterateurs just as they were landlords; historians, as they were government officials; clergymen, as they were collectors. This motley crew had one thing in common: they all had read DNL. Cataclysmic political developments have prevented us from having KU in its final form. Not all the letters Narbutt himself had included in his collection have survived to this day. However, regardless of how incomplete KU today is, it features the names of nearly every scholar of Lithuania’s history or lover of Lithuanian antiques of the period nonetheless. The underlying theme of KU is Lithuania’s history, search for and dissemination of historic sources. The letters wax lyrical about DNL, while criticism is very subdued, if any. The collection reveals Narbutt as a prominent authority figure, a person that had rocked both the scientific world of the history of Lithuania and the public in general. KU had a high psychological value for Narbutt as well. DNL’s critique in the press was a source of daily stress, and the letters from Narbutt’s correspondents pointed to quite the opposite – approval of his research and DNL’s dissemination amidst the society. That was probably the reason why Narbutt fostered this collection so much. His ongoing concern was evident in his handmade folders for the letters, and even more so in his own notes. The books in his library were the only other thing that he would approach in a similar manner. 20th century historians have come to consider KU as a weighty piece of evidence of Narbutt as an honest researcher. However, what matters so much more is not the case of the so-called case of historic (non-)falsification, but the perception of KU as a whole. Most of the letters were written after the closure of the Imperial University of Vilnius. There was no official Vilnius school of history any more, but the historic thought had survived. It would present itself through search for and dissemination of sources of Lithuanian history, through historic tracts and reviews (anonymous as often as not). It would become evident on yet another level: in letters, hence private media that served as a forum for curious scientific seminars and epistolary dialogue on the subject of the history of Lithuania. It was through no accident that, instead of opting for just Correspondence, Narbutt titled his collection Scientific Correspondence. It stands to represent Szawry in its own peculiar way as well. The provincial manor became an intellectual centre – something that would have been impossible but for DNL, with all the mistakes that were (not) made in the tract.
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Notícias, Transfer. "Noticias." Transfer 10, no. 1-2 (October 4, 2021): 138–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1344/transfer.2015.10.138-148.
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NOTICIAS / NEWS (“Transfer”, 2015) 1) CONGRESOS / CONFERENCES: 1. First Forlì International Workshop – Corpus-based Interpreting Studies: The State of the Art University of Bologna at Forlì, 7-8 May 2015. http://eventi.sslmit.unibo.it/cis1/<file:///owa/redir.aspx 2. 5th IATIS Conference – Innovation Paths in Translation and Intercultural Studies, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 7-10 July 2015. www.iatis.org/index.php/iatis-belo-horizonte-conference/itemlist/category/168-call-for-communication-proposals-within-the-general-conference 3. POETRY/TRANSLATION/FILM – POÉSIE/TRADUCTION/FILM PoeTransFi, Paul Valéry University, Montpellier, France, 18-19 June 2015. http://pays-anglophones.upv.univ-montp3.fr/?page_id=1795 4. 6th International Maastricht-Lodz Duo Colloquium on “Translation and Meaning”, Maastricht School of Translation & Interpre-ting, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, Maastricht, Netherlands 21-22 May 2015. www.translation-and-meaning.nl 5. MiddleWOmen. Networking and cultural mediation with and between women (1850-1950). Centre for Reception Studies (CERES), HERA Travelling TexTs project and Huygens ING KU Leuven campus Brussels 7-8 May 2015. www.receptionstudies.be 6. 5th International Symposium: Respeaking, Live Subtitling and Accessibility, Università degli Studi Internazionali di Roma, Italy, 12 June 2015. www.unint.eu/it/component/content/article/8-pagina/494-respeaking-live-subtitling-and-accessibility.html 7. Conference on Law, Translation and Culture (LTC5) and Legal and Institutional Translation Seminar, University of Geneva, Switzerland 24-26 June 2015. www.unige.ch/traduction-interpretation/recherches/groupes/transius/conference2015_en.html 8. 6th International Conference Media for All – Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility: Global Challenges, University of Western Sydney, Australia, 16-18 September 2015. http://uws.edu.au/mediaforall 9. Translation in Exile, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 10-11 December 2015. www.cliv.be 10. Literary Translation as Creation, Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse, 20-21 May 2015. laurence.belingard@univ-avignon.fr marie-francoise.sanconie@univ-avignon.fr 11. 4th International Conference on Language, Medias and Culture (ICLMC 2015) 9-10 April 2015. Kyoto, Japan, www.iclmc.org 12. 9th International Colloquium on Translation Studies in Portugal – Translation & Revolution, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon, 22-23 October 2015. ix.translation.revolution@gmail.com 13. Translation as Collaboration: Translaboration?, University of Westminster, London, 18 June 2015 Contact: Alexa Alfer (A.Alfer01@westminster.ac.uk), Steven Cranfield (S.Cranfield@westminster.ac.uk), Paresh Kathrani (P.Kathrani@westminster.ac.uk) 14. Translation/Interpreting Teaching and the Bologna Process: Pathways between Unity and Diversity, FTSK Germersheim, Germany 27–29 November 2015. www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/did2015/index_ENG.php 15. Atlantic Communities: Translation, Mobility, Hospitality, University of Vigo, Spain, 17-18 September 2015. http://translating.hypotheses.org/551 16. Exploring the Literary World III: Transgression and Translation in Literature Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand 23-24 April 2015. www.arts.chula.ac.th/~complit/complite/?q=conference 17. Authenticity and Imitation in Translation and Culture, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland, 7 – 9 May 2015. www.swps.pl/english-version/news/conferences/12164-authenticity-and-imitation-in-translation-and-culture 18. Translation in Transition, Barnard College, New York City, USA 1-2 May 2015. barnard.edu/translation/translation-in-transition 19. First Forlì International Workshop – Corpus-based Interpreting Studies: The state of the art, University of Bologna at Forlì, Italy, 7-8 May 2015. http://eventi.sslmit.unibo.it/cis1 20. Translation and Meaning. The Lodz Session of the 6th International Maastricht-Lodz Duo Colloquium, University of Lodz, Poland, 18-19 September 2015. http://duo.uni.lodz.pl 21. TAO-CAT-2015, Université Catholique de l’Ouest, Angers, France 28-30 May 2015. www.tao2015.org/home-new 22. English Language and Literary Studies (ELLS 2015), Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, 3-4 August 2015. http://ells2015.com 23. Talking to the World 2: The Relevance of Translation and Interpreting – Past, Present and Future, Newcastle University, UK, 10-11 September 2015. www.ncl.ac.uk/sml/study/postgraduate/T&I/2015conference/main.htm 24. 6th International Symposium for Young Researchers in Translation, Interpreting, Intercultural Studies and East Asian Studies Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, 3 July 2015. www.fti.uab.es/departament/simposi-2015/en/index.htm 25. Portsmouth Translation Conference: Border Crossing or Border Creation?, University of Portsmouth, UK, 14 November 2015. www.port.ac.uk/translation/events/conference 26. New Perspectives in Assessment in Translation Training: Bridging the Gap between Academic and Professional Assessment, University of Westminster, London, UK, 4 September 2015. www.westminster.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/humanities/archive/2014/mlc/new-perspectives-in-assessment-in-translation-training-bridging-the-gap-between-academic-and-professional-assessment 27. III Congreso Internacional de Neología en las Lenguas Románicas University of Salamanca, 22-24 October 2015. http://diarium.usal.es/cineo2015 28. Some Holmes and Popovič in all of us? The Low Countries and the Nitra Schools in the 21st century, Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra, Slovakia, 8-10 October 2015. Contact: igor.tyss@gmail.com 29. The Cultural Politics of Translation, Cairo, Egypt, 27-29 October 2015. https://culturalpoliticstranslation2015.wordpress.com 30. Journée d’étude « le(s) figure(s) du traducteur », Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada, 30 April 2015. http://mrujs.mtroyal.ca/index.php/cf/index 31. Mediterranean Editors and Translators Annual Meeting —Versatility and readiness for new challenges, University of Coimbra, Portugal, 29-31 October 2015. www.metmeetings.org/en/preliminary-program:722 32. Lengua, Literatura y Traducción “liLETRAd”, University of Seville, Spain, 7-8 July 2015. http://congreso.us.es/liletrad. 33. Meta: Translators' Journal is celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2015! For the occasion, an anniversary colloquium will be held on August 19th to 21st, 2015 at the Université de Montréal (Montréal, Canada). Colloquium for the 60th Anniversary of META – 1955-2015: Les horizons de la traduction: retour vers le futur. Translation’s horizons: back to the future. Los horizontes de la traducción: regreso al futuro, August 19-21, 2015 – Université de Montréal. Please send your proposal to this address: meta60e@gmail.com, to the attention of Georges L. Bastin or Eve-Marie Gendron-Pontbrian 2) CURSOS DE POSGRADO / MASTERS: 1. Legal Translation, Master universitario di II livello in Traduzione Giuridica University of Trieste, Italy. http://apps.units.it/Sitedirectory/InformazioniSpecificheCdS/Default.aspx?cdsid=10374&ordinamento=2012&sede=1&int=web&lingua=15 2. Traducción Especializada, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Spain. http://estudios.uoc.edu/es/masters-posgrados-especializaciones/master/artes-humanidades/traduccion-especializada/presentacion 3. Online course: La Traducción Audiovisual y el Aprendizaje de Lenguas Extranjeras, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, 1st December 2014 to 31st May 2015. http://formacionpermanente.uned.es/tp_actividad/idactividad/7385 https://canal.uned.es/mmobj/index/id/21174 Contact: Noa Talaván (ntalavan@flog.uned.es), José Javier Ávila (javila@flog.uned.es) 4. Online course: Audio Description and Its Use in the Foreign Language Classroom, UNED, Madrid, Spain http://formacionpermanente.uned.es/tp_actividad/idactividad/7492 5. Online course: Curso de Formación de Profesorado, La Traducción Audiovisual y el Aprendizaje de Lenguas Extranjeras UNED, Madrid, Spain. http://formacionpermanente.uned.es/tp_actividad/idactividad/7385 6. EST Training Seminar for Translation Teachers, Kraków, Poland 29 June – 3 July 2015. www.est-translationstudies.org/events/2015_seminar_teachers/index.html 7. Train the Trainer -Teaching MT: EAMT-funded Workshop, Dublin City University, 30 April- 1 May 2015. https://cttsdcu.wordpress.com/eamt-workshop-on-teaching-mt-to-translator-trainers-30-april-1-may 3) CURSOS DE VERANO / SUMMER COURSES: 1. 2015 Nida School of Translation Studies, Leading Edges in Translation: World Literature and Performativity, San Pellegrino University Foundation campus, Misano Adriatico, Italy, 18-29 may 2015. http://nsts.fusp.it/Nida-Schools/NSTS-2015 2. EMUNI Translation Studies Doctoral and Teacher Training Summer School, University of Turku, Finland, 1-12 June 2015. www.utu.fi/en/units/hum/units/languages/EASS/Pages/home.aspx 3. Chinese-English Translation and Interpretation, School of Translation and Interpretation, University of Ottawa, Canada, 13th July – 7th August 7 2015. http://arts.uottawa.ca/translation/summer-programs 4. Summer Program in Translation Pedagogy, University of Ottawa 13 July – 7 August 2015. http://arts.uottawa.ca/translation/summer-programs 4) LIBROS / BOOKS: 1. Audio Description: New Perspectives Illustrated, Edited by Anna Maszerowska, Anna Matamala and Pilar Orero, John Benjamins, 2014. https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/btl.112/main 2. Call for papers: Translation Studies in Africa and beyond: Reconsidering the Postcolony, Editors: J Marais & AE Feinauer Contacts: Kobus Marais (jmarais@ufs.ac.za) or Ilse Feinauer (aef@sun.ac.za). 4. Measuring live subtitling quality: Results from the second sampling exercise, Ofcom, UK. http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/consultations/subtitling/sampling-results-2 5. A Training Handbook for Legal and Court Interpreters in Australia by Mary Vasilakakos, ISBN 978-0-9925873-0-7, Publisher: Language Experts Pty Ltd. www.interpreterrevalidationtraining.com www.languageexperts.com.au 6. Call for papers: Opera and Translation: Eastern and Western Perspectives, Edited by Adriana Serban and Kelly Kar Yue Chan http://pays-anglophones.upv.univ-montp3.fr/?page_id=1908 7. The Known Unknowns of Translation Studies, Edited by Elke Brems, Reine Meylaerts and Luc van Doorslaer, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2014. https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/bct.69/main 8. Translating the Voices of Theory/ La traduction des voi de la théorie Edited by Isabelle Génin and Ida Klitgård, 2014. www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/groups/Voice-in-Translation/ 9. Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation 1 - Collaborative Relationships between Authors, Translators, and Performers, Eds. Hanne Jansen and Anna Wegener, 2014. http://editionsquebecoisesdeloeuvre.ca/data/documents/AEVA-Flyer-1-190895-Vita-Traductiva-Vol-2-Flyer-EN-100413.pdf 10. Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation 2 - Editorial and Publishing Practices, Eds. Hanne Jansen and Anna Wegener, 2014. www.editionsquebecoisesdeloeuvre.ca/accueil 11. Call for papers: Achieving Consilience. Translation Theories and Practice. https://cfpachievingconsilience.wordpress.com 12. Framing the Interpreter. Towards a visual perspective. Anxo Fernández-Ocampo & Michaela Wolf (eds.), 2014, London: Routledge. http://routledge-ny.com/books/details/9780415712743 13. Multilingual Information Management: Information, Technology and Translators, Ximo Granell, 2014. http://store.elsevier.com/Multilingual-Information-Management/Ximo-Granell-/isbn-9781843347712/ 14. Writing and Translating Francophone Discourse: Africa, The Caribbean, Diaspora, Paul F. Bandia (ed.), 2014, Amsterdam, Rodopi www.brill.com/products/book/writing-and-translating-francophone-discourse 15. Call for papers (collective volumen): Translation studies in Africa and beyond: Reconsidering the postcolony www.facebook.com/notes/mona-baker/translation-studies-in-africa-and-beyond-reconsidering-the-postcolony/743564399051495 16. Audiovisual Translation in the Digital Age - The Italian Fansubbing Phenomenon, By Serenella Massidda, Palgrave Connect, 2015. www.palgrave.com/page/detail/audiovisual-translation-in-the-digital-age-serenella-massidda/?k=9781137470362 17. Video: First International SOS-VICS Conference - Building communication bridges in gender violence, University of Vigo, Spain 25-26 September 2014. http://cuautla.uvigo.es/CONSOS/ 18. Camps, Assumpta. Traducción y recepción de la literatura italiana, Publicacions i Edicions UB, 2014. ISBN: 978-84-475-3776-1. 19. Camps, Assumpta. Italia en la prensa periódica durante el franquismo, Publicacions i Edicions UB, 2014. ISBN: 978-84-475-3753-2. 5) REVISTAS / JOURNALS: Call for papers: “Altre Modernità – Rivista di studi letterarie e culturali” Special Issue: Ideological Manipulation in Audiovisual Translation, Contact: irene.ranzato@uniroma.it. http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/AMonline/announcement/view/381 2. Call for papers: “Between, Journal of the Italian Association of Comparative Literature”. Special issue on censorship and self-censorship. http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/pages/view/CFP9_censura_auto-censura 3. Open access journal, “Hieronymus, A Journal of Translation Studies and Terminology”, Croatia. www.ffzg.unizg.hr/hieronymus 4. “DIE SCHNAKE. Zeitschrift für Sprachkritik, Satire, Literatur”, Number 39+40, Kleines ABC des Literaturübersetzens. www.rainer-kohlmayer.de 5. Call for papers: “MonTI” 8 (2016) - Economic, Financial and Business Translation: from Theory to Training and Professional Practice. http://dti.ua.es/es/monti-english/monti-authors.html daniel.gallego@ua.es 6. Call for papers: “LINGUISTICA ANTVERPIENSIA”, NEW SERIES -Themes in Translation Studies (15/2016). Interpreting in Conflict Situations and in Conflict Zones throughout History. https://lans.ua.ac.be/index.php/LANS-TTS/announcement 7. Call for papers: “CULTUS: The Journal of Intercultural Mediation and Communication” (8/2016). The Intercultural Question and the Interpreting Professions. www.cultusjournal.com 8. Call for papers: “The Journal of Specialised Translation” Non-thematic issue, Issue 26, July 2016. www.jostrans.org 9. “TranscUlturAl: A journal of Translation and Culture Studies”, Special issue Translating Street Art. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/TC/issue/view/1634 10. “Przekładaniec 28: Audiodeskrypcja [Audio Description]”, edited by Anna Jankowska and Agnieszka Szarkowska. All papers are published in Polish, with English abstracts. www.ejournals.eu/Przekladaniec/zakladka/66/ 11. Call for papers: “Lingvisticæ Investigationes”, Special issue on Spanish Phraseology: Varieties and Variations. http://dti.ua.es/es/documentos/li-call-for-papers-spanish-phraseology-varieties-and-variations.pdf Further details: Pedro.mogorron@ua.es; xblancoe@gmail.com 13. Call for papers: “Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos”, Special issue on The Translation of Advertising. Contact: Laura Cruz (lcruz@dis.ulpgc.es). Deadline: 20th July 2015. www.webs.ulpgc.es/lfe 14. “The AALITRA Review”. www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/ALLITRA 15. “Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E” www.cttl.org/cttl-e-2014.html 16. Call for papers: “Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E”. www.cttl.org 18. Call for papers: “Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts”, Volume 1, Number 2, 2015 Deadline: 10-Jan-2015. https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/ttmc/main 19. Call for book reviews: “TRANS. Revista de Traductología,” vol.19, 2015. Deadline: Friday, 30th January 2015. www.trans.uma.es trans@uma.es 20. Call for papers: “a journal of literature, culture and literary Translation”. Special volume – Utopia and Political Theology Today Deadline: 15th January 2015. Contact: sic.journal.contact@gmail.com https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01 21. “trans-kom”. www.trans-kom.eu 22. “Linguistica Antverpiensia” NS-TTS 13/2014: Multilingualism at the cinema and on stage: A translation perspective, Edited by Reine Meylaerts and Adriana Şerban. https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be/index.php/LANS-TTS/issue/current 23. Call for papers: 5th issue (2015) of “Estudios de Traducción”, Deadline: 20 February 2015. www.ucm.es/iulmyt/revista 24. Call for papers: “Journal of Translation Studies” - special issue on Translator & Interpreter Education in East Asia. KATS (Korean Association of Translation Studies), www.kats.or.kr (Go to 'English' page). Contact: Won Jun Nam (wonjun_nam@daum.net, wjnam@hufs.ac.kr). 25. “The Journal of Specialised Translation”, 23, January 2015. www.jostrans.org 26. Call for papers: “TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies”. Deadline: 15 March 2015. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/TC/announcement 27. “New Voices in Translation Studies”, Issue 11 (Fall 2014). www.iatis.org/index.php/publications/new-voices-in-translation-studies/item/1034-issue11-2014 28. “The Interpreter and Translator Trainer”, 8:3 (2014). Special issue: Dialogue Interpreting in practice: bridging the gap between empirical research and interpreter education E. Davitti and S. Pasquandrea (eds.) www.tandfonline.com/toc/ritt20/current#.VLQHuyvF-So 6) WEBS DE INTERÉS / WEBSITES OF INTEREST: 1. Support Spanish interpreters to secure the right to translation and interpreting in criminal proceedings: www.change.org/p/pablo-casado-retiren-el-proyecto-de-ley-org%C3%A1nica-que-modifica-la-lecrim
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Tsygankov, Alexander S. "History of Philosophy. 2018, Vol. 23, No. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Theory and Methodology of History of Philosophy Rodion V. Savinov. Philosophy of Antiquity in Scholasticism This article examines the forms of understanding ancient philosophy in medieval and post-medieval scholasticism. Using the comparative method the author identifies the main approaches to the philosophical heritage of Antiquity, and to the problem of reviving the doctrines of the past. The Patristics (Epiphanius of Cyprus, Filastrius of Brixia, Lactantius, Augustine) saw the ancient cosmological doctrines as heresies. The early Middle Ages (e.g., Isidore of Seville) assimilated the content of these heresiographic treatises, which became the main source of information about ancient philosophy. Scholasticism of the 13th–14th cent. remained cautious to ancient philosophy and distinguished, on the one hand, the doctrinal content discussed in the framework of the exegetic problems at universities (Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, etc.), and, on the other hand, information on ancient philosophers integrated into chronological models of medieval chronicles (Peter Comestor, Vincent de Beauvais, Walter Burleigh). Finally, the post-medieval scholasticism (Pedro Fonseca, Conimbricenses, Th. Stanley, and others) raised the questions of the «history of ideas», thereby laying the foundation of the history of philosophy in its modern sense. Keywords: history of philosophy, Patristic, Scholasticism, reflection, critic DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-5-17 World Philosophy: the Past and the Present Mariya A. Solopova. The Chronology of Democritus and the Fall of Troy The article considers the chronology of Democritus of Abdera. In the times of Classical Antiquity, three different birth dates for Democritus were known: c. 495 BC (according to Diodorus of Sicily), c. 470 BC (according to Thrasyllus), and c. 460 BC (according to Apollodorus of Athens). These dates must be coordinated with the most valuable doxographic evidence, according to which Democritus 1) "was a young man during Anaxagoras’s old age" and that 2) the Lesser World-System (Diakosmos) was compiled 730 years after the Fall of Troy. The article considers the argument in favor of the most authoritative datings belonging to Apollodorus and Thrasyllus, and draws special attention to the meaning of the dating of Democritus’ work by himself from the year of the Fall of Troy. The question arises, what prompted Democritus to talk about the date of the Fall of Troy and how he could calculate it. The article expresses the opinion that Democritus indicated the date of the Fall of Troy not with the aim of proposing its own date, different from others, but in order to date the Lesser World-System in the spirit of intellectual achievements of his time, in which, perhaps, the history of the development of mankind from the primitive state to the emergence of civilization was discussed. The article discusses how to explain the number 730 and argues that it can be the result of combinations of numbers 20 (the number of generations that lived from the Fall of Troy to Democritus), 35 – one of the constants used for calculations of generations in genealogical research, and 30. The last figure perhaps indicates the age of Democritus himself, when he wrote the Lesser Diakosmos: 30 years old. Keywords: Ancient Greek philosophy, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Greek chronography, doxographers, Apollodorus, Thrasyllus, capture of Troy, ancient genealogies, the length of a generation DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-18-31 Bembya L. Mitruyev. “Yogācārabhumi-Śāstra” as a Historical and Philosophical Source The article deals with “Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra” – a treatise on the Buddhist Yogācāra school. Concerning the authorship of this text, the Indian and Chinese traditions diverge: in the first, the treatise is attributed to Asanga, and in the second tradition to Maitreya. Most of the modern scholars consider it to be a compilation of many texts, and not the work of one author. Being an important monument for both the Yogacara tradition and Mahayana Buddhism in general, Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra is an object of scientific interest for the researchers all around the world. The text of the treatise consists of five parts, which are divided into chapters. The contents of the treatise sheds light on many concepts of Yogācāra, such as ālayavijñāna, trisvabhāva, kliṣṭamanas, etc. Having briefly considered the textological problems: authorship, dating, translation, commenting and genre of the text, the author suggests the reconstruction of the content of the entire monument, made on the basis of his own translation from the Tibetan and Sanskrit. This allows him to single out from the whole variety of topics those topics, the study of which will increase knowledge about the history of the formation of the basic philosophical concepts of Yogācāra and thereby allow a deeper understanding of the historical and philosophical process in Buddhism and in other philosophical movements of India. Keywords: Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra, Asaṅga, Māhāyana, Vijñānavāda, Yogācāra, Abhidharma, ālayavijñāna citta, bhūmi, mind, consciousness, meditation DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-32-43 Tatiana G. Korneeva. Knowledge in Nāșir Khusraw’s Philosophy The article deals with the concept of “knowledge” in the philosophy of Nāșir Khusraw. The author analyzes the formation of the theory of knowledge in the Arab-Muslim philosophy. At the early stages of the formation of the Arab-Muslim philosophy the discussion of the question of cognition was conducted in the framework of ethical and religious disputes. Later followers of the Falsafa introduced the legacy of ancient philosophers into scientific circulation and began to discuss the problems of cognition in a philosophical way. Nāșir Khusraw, an Ismaili philosopher of the 11th century, expanded the scope of knowledge and revised the goals and objectives of the process of cognition. He put knowledge in the foundation of the world order, made it the cause and ultimate goal of the creation of the world. In his philosophy knowledge is the link between the different levels of the universe. The article analyzes the Nāșir Khusraw’s views on the role of knowledge in various fields – metaphysics, cosmogony, ethics and eschatology. Keywords: knowledge, cognition, Ismailism, Nāșir Khusraw, Neoplatonism, Arab-Muslim philosophy, kalām, falsafa DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-44-55 Vera Pozzi. Problems of Ontology and Criticism of the Kantian Formalism in Irodion Vetrinskii’s “Institutiones Metaphysicae” (Part II) This paper is a follow-up of the paper «Irodion Vetrinskii’s “Institutiones Metaphysicae” and the St. Petersburg Theological Academy» (Part I). The issue and the role of “ontology” in Vetrinskii’s textbook is analyzed in detail, as well as the author’s critique of Kantian “formalism”: in this connection, the paper provides a description of Vetrinskii’s discussion about Kantian theory of the a priori forms of sensible intuition and understanding. To sum up, Vetrinskii was well acquainted not only with Kantian works – and he was able to fully evaluate their innovative significance – but also with late Scholastic textbooks of the German area. Moreover, he relied on the latters to build up an eclectic defense of traditional Metaphysics, avoiding at the same time to refuse Kantian perspective in the sake of mere reaffirming a “traditional” perspective. Keywords: Philosophizing at Russian Theological Academies, Russian Enlightenment, Russian early Kantianism, St. Petersburg Theological Academy, history of Russian philosophy, history of metaphysics, G.I. Wenzel, I. Ya. Vetrinskii DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-56-67 Alexey E. Savin. Criticism of Judaism in Hegel's Early “Theological” Writings The aim of the article is to reveal the nature of criticism of Judaism by the “young” Hegel and underlying intuitions. The investigation is based on the phenomenological approach. It seeks to explicate the horizon of early Hegel's thinking. The revolutionary role of early Hegel’s ideas reactivation in the history of philosophy is revealed. The article demonstrates the fundamental importance of criticism of Judaism for the development of Hegel's thought. The sources of Hegelian thematization and problematization of Judaism – his Protestant theological background within the framework of supranaturalism and the then discussion about human rights and political emancipation of Jews – are discovered. Hegel's interpretation of the history of the Jewish people and the origin of Judaism from the destruction of trust in nature, the fundamental mood of distrust and fear of the world, leading to the development of alienation, is revealed. The falsity of the widespread thesis about early Hegel’s anti-Semitism is demonstrated. The reasons for the transition of early Hegel from “theology” to philosophy are revealed. Keywords: Hegel, Judaism, history, criticism, anti-Semitism, trust, nature, alienation, tyranny, philosophy DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-68-80 Evgeniya A. Dolgova. Philosophy at the Institute of Red Professors (1921–1938): Institutional Forms, Methods of Teaching, Students, Lecturers The article explores the history of the Institute of the Red Professors in philosophy (1921–1938). Referring to the unpublished documents in the State Archives of the Russian Federation and the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the author explores its financial and infrastructure support, information sphere, characterizes students and teachers. The article illustrates the practical experience of the functioning of philosophy within the framework of one of the extraordinary “revolutionary” projects on the renewal of the scientific and pedagogical sphere, reflects a vivid and ambiguous picture of the work of the educational institution in the 1920s and 1930s and corrects some of historiographical judgments (about the politically and socially homogeneous composition of the Institute of Red Professors, the specifics of state support of its work, privileges and the social status of the “red professors”). Keywords: Institute of the Red Professors in Philosophy, Philosophical Department, soviet education, teachers, students, teaching methods DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-81-94 Vladimir V. Starovoitov. K. Horney about the Consequences of Neurotic Development and the Ways of Its Overcoming This article investigates the views of Karen Horney on psychoanalysis and neurotic development of personality in her last two books: “Our Inner Conflicts” (1945) and “Neurosis and Human Grows” (1950), and also in her two articles “On Feeling Abused” (1951) and “The Paucity of Inner Experiences” (1952), written in the last two years of her life and summarizing her views on clinical and theoretical problems in her work with neurotics. If in her first book “The Neurotic Personality of Our Time” (1937) neurosis was a result of disturbed interpersonal relations, caused by conditions of culture, then the concept of the idealized Self open the gates to the intrapsychic life. Keywords: Neo-Freudianism, psychoanalysis, neurotic development of personality, real Self, idealized image of Self DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-95-102 Publications and Translations Victoria G. Lysenko. Dignāga on the Definition of Perception in the Vādaviddhi of Vasubandhu. A Historical and Philosophical Reconstruction of Dignāga’s Pramāṇasamuccayavṛtti (1.13-16) The paper investigates a fragment from Dignāga’s magnum opus Pramāṇasamuccayavṛtti (“Body of tools for reliable knowledge with a commentary”, 1, 13-16) where Dignāga challenges Vasubandhu’s definition of perception in the Vādaviddhi (“Rules of the dispute”). The definition from the Vādaviddhi is being compared in the paper with Vasubandhu’s ideas of perception in Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (“Encyclopedia of Abhidharma with the commentary”), and with Dignāga’s own definition of valid perception in the first part of his Pramāṇasamuccayavṛtti as well as in his Ālambanaparīkśavṛtti (“Investigation of the Object with the commentary”). The author puts forward the hypothesis that Dignāga criticizes the definition of perception in Vādaviddhi for the reason that it does not correspond to the teachings of Vasubandhu in his Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, to which he, Dignāga, referred earlier in his magnum opus. This helps Dignāga to justify his statement that Vasubandhu himself considered Vādaviddhi as not containing the essence of his teaching (asāra). In addition, the article reconstructs the logical sequence in Dignāga’s exegesis: he criticizes the Vādaviddhi definition from the representational standpoint of Sautrāntika school, by showing that it does not fulfill the function prescribed by Indian logic to definition, that of distinguishing perception from the classes of heterogeneous and homogeneous phenomena. Having proved the impossibility of moving further according to the “realistic logic” based on recognizing the existence of an external object, Dignāga interprets the Vādaviddhi’s definition in terms of linguistic philosophy, according to which the language refers not to external objects and not to the unique and private sensory experience (svalakṣaṇa-qualia), but to the general characteristics (sāmānya-lakṣaṇa), which are mental constructs (kalpanā). Keywords: Buddhism, linguistic philosophy, perception, theory of definition, consciousness, Vaibhashika, Sautrantika, Yogacara, Vasubandhu, Dignaga DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-103-117 Elizaveta A. Miroshnichenko. Talks about Lev N. Tolstoy: Reception of the Writer's Views in the Public Thought of Russia at the End of the 19th Century (Dedicated to the 190th Anniversary of the Great Russian Writer and Thinker) This article includes previously unpublished letters of Russian social thinkers such as N.N. Strakhov, E.M. Feoktistov, D.N. Tsertelev. These letters provide critical assessment of Lev N. Tolstoy’s teachings. The preface to publication includes the history of reception of Tolstoy’s moral and aesthetic philosophy by his contemporaries, as well as influence of his theory on the beliefs of Russian idealist philosopher D.N. Tsertelev. The author offers a rational reconstruction of the dialogue between two generations of thinkers representative of the 19th century – Lev N. Tolstoy and N.N. Strakhov, on the one hand, and D.N. Tsertelev, on the other. The main thesis of the paper: the “old” and the “new” generations of the 19th-century thinkers retained mutual interest and continuity in setting the problems and objectives of philosophy, despite the numerous worldview contradictions. Keywords: Russian philosophy of the nineteenth century, L.N. Tolstoy, N.N. Strakhov, D.N. Tsertelev, epistolary heritage, ethics, aesthetics DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-118-130 Reviews Nataliya A. Tatarenko. History of Philosophy in a Format of Lecture Notes (on Hegel G.W.F. Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik. Vorlesungsmitschrift Adolf Heimann (1828/1829). Hrsg. von A.P. Olivier und A. Gethmann-Siefert. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2017. XXXI + 254 S.) Released last year, the book “G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik. Vorlesungsmitschrift Adolf Heimann (1828/1829)” in German is a publication of one of the student's manuskript of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics. Adolf Heimann was a student of Hegel in 1828/29. These notes open for us imaginary doors into the audience of the Berlin University, where Hegel read his fourth and final course on the philosophy of art. A distinctive feature of this course is a new structure of lectures in comparison with three previous courses. This three-part division was took by H.G. Hotho as the basis for the edited by him text “Lectures on Aesthetics”, included in the first collection of Hegel’s works. The content of that publication was mainly based on the lectures of 1823 and 1826. There are a number of differences between the analyzed published manuskript and the students' records of 1820/21, 1823 and 1826, as well as between the manuskript and the editorial version of H.G. Hotho. These features show that Hegel throughout all four series of Berlin lectures on the philosophy of art actively developed and revised the structure and content of aesthetics. But unfortunately this evidence of the permanent development was not taken into account by the first editor of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics. Keywords: G.W.F. Hegel, H.G. Hotho, philosophy of art, aesthetics, forms of art, idea of beauty, ideal DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-131-138 Alexander S. Tsygankov. On the Way to the Revival of Metaphysics: S.L. Frank and E. Coreth Readers are invited to review the monograph of the modern German researcher Oksana Nazarova “The problem of the renaissance and new foundation of metaphysics through the example of Christian philosophical tradition. Russian religious philosophy (Simon L. Frank) and German neosholastics (Emerich Coreth)”, which was published in 2017 in Munich. In the paper, the author offers a comparative analysis of the projects of a new, “post-dogmatic” metaphysics, which were developed in the philosophy of Frank and Coreth. This study addresses the problems of the cognitive-theoretical and ontological foundation of the renaissance of metaphysics, the methodological tools of the new metaphysics, as well as its anthropological component. O. Nazarova's book is based on the comparative analysis of Frank's religious philosophy and Coreth's neo-cholastic philosophy from the beginning to the end. This makes the study unique in its own way. Since earlier in the German reception of the heritage of Russian thinker, the comparison of Frank's philosophy with the Catholic theology of the 20th century was realized only fragmentarily and did not act as a fundamental one. Along with a deep and meaningful analysis of the metaphysical projects of both thinkers, this makes O. Nazarova's book relevant to anyone who is interested in the philosophical dialogue of Russia and Western Europe and is engaged in the work of Frank and Coreth. Keywords: the renaissance of metaphysics, post-Kantian philosophy, Christian philosophy, S.L. Frank, E. Coreth DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-139-147." History of Philosophy 23, no. 2 (October 2018): 139–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-139-147.
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Hudzik, Jan P. "Nowa filozofia mediów w Niemczech." Humaniora. Czasopismo Internetowe 32, no. 4 (December 15, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/h.2020.4.6.
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This article is about the philosophy of media developed in Germany as early as at the end of the 20th century. It was appeared as the Medienphilosophie – media philosophy – due to a coincidence of two different events that happened in social theory and practice – it’s when the end of certain period in German philosophy coincided then with the beginning of cyber civilization. The understanding of the latter situation demands the creation of a new language – a new analytical and critical apparatus capable of grasping reality becoming more and more medialized. The problem is not so much a question of particular media, but mediality itself. The reconstruction of the philosophy in question does not consist of the presentation of the views expressed by all its authors. It is less about substantive findings of this philosophy and more about its meta-theoretical aspects – the ontological and epistemological assumptions, conceptual apparatus, modes of justification. This text consists of five parts. The first two ones present origins and contexts of the development of the Medienphilosophie. The following two parts are concerned with the identity of media philosophy – its metatheoretical characteristics contained in the writings of two prominent figures – Frank Hartmann and Sybille Krämer. The last part is devoted to the specificity of the scientific and philosophical discipline after the so-called media turn.
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Vonen, Arnfinn Muruvik. "Conrad Svendsens beskrivelse av norsk tegnspråk." Nordlyd 46, no. 1 (August 30, 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.7557/12.6392.
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This text presents an introductory investigation of Conrad Svendsen’s analysis of Norwegian Sign Language, as it appears in a set of handwritten notes that have been preserved after him, supposedly from around 1910. The notes are significant for the history of the field, since little material has been preserved about Norwegian Sign Language before the end of the 20th century. Svendsen was an important personality, at first in Christiania’s [Oslo’s] community for the education of deaf children, then in the Church’s services for the deaf community, and finally in the establishment of a «home for the deaf». Since Svendsen’s own sign language political views have paradoxical features, it is interesting to find out to what extent he had a real understanding of what sign language is. The introductory investigation concludes that Svendsen had a good understanding of many aspects of Norwegian Sign Language and also was able to articulate well his pedagogical presentation of the material. However, he seems to assume that the sign language is less conventionalized than we have a reason today to believe that it may have been in his day. And to be able to assess how autonomous his understanding was, a closer investigation is needed of how he may have been influenced by earlier authors, not least in the German-speaking world.
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Muir, Adam, and Daniel Hourigan. "Technique." M/C Journal 18, no. 2 (April 30, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.975.
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For this issue of M/C Journal we were inspired to select the theme of ‘technique’ by the intersection of the critical discourses around technology and the praxis of everyday life that has been a preoccupation of late-20th and early-21st century cultural studies. We wanted to revisit, rupture, and reconstruct the foundational terms that give this journal its name—media and culture—by using the common nexus of technology. This special issue enlivens the idea of technique within the gamut of technology, media, science, culture, and creativity. The idea of technique is itself an intriguing prompt for the authors in this issue. It has inspired their pursuit of ideas of processes and procedures, methods and makers, habits and hacks, routines and rituals, and knowledge and know-how. Sharing a common etymology with technology, technique builds upon the ancient Greek term techne that describes the arts and mechanical crafts. If we connect technique and technology to this genealogical inheritance, we are presented with an insistence upon understanding how we craft not only objects but also the world. Throughout history we can find plenty of examples of tools and devices all increasing in technical complexity over time to meet the needs of human societies as they unfold across time—from axes and spears, drawing and writing implements, and clockwork mechanisms to telescopes, eye-glasses, and time-keeping and counting machines. As technical objects have become more complex, the cultures that produce them have produced increasingly specialised knowledge and fragmentary perceptions of the world in which they exist. Technology is thus the study of how to apply techne, craft; when people employ technology they are not just making use of a tool or device, they are also generating and employing techniques constitutive of a world view. While this might seem high-minded, the above reflection is based on the recognition that humans make use of techniques every day. Marshall McLuhan famously described this everyday relation with technologies and their techniques as extensions of the human body, notably of the senses. For McLuhan (1964), media are the substance of these extensions, and these extensions include a range of things beyond the tired trio of newspapers, radio and television, such as those engaged with by our authors in this issue. There is a long cross-cultural genealogy of ideas about technology and technique, which is far too large to discuss in sufficient detail here, it may suffice for us to summarise our focus by turning to the work of the influential British Cultural Studies scholar Raymond Williams. For Williams (1974), technology is used by people, and in this use people create meaningful exchanges of information structured by techniques and know-how. Used in this way, Williams argues, technology becomes a medium of communication that interacts with a social context. More strongly, Williams suggests that it is from a social necessity first and foremost that people develop techniques that make use of technology that is available in their milieu. The insight of Williams is that technology is frequently a (or the) material basis for late capitalist culture, and that techniques are a culmination of the knowledge of what technology is used for and, significantly, how to use it. Media are thus the applied use of technology as forms a social link, a mediation, between ourselves and the world. As history has demonstrated however, there are always unintended consequences that come with each new medium. Sometimes it is as simple as unintended uses that go beyond anything the original creator dreamed of. People routinely test the limits and boundaries of a new medium by examining what is already possible. Creativity is key to these experiments. For instance, the classic definition of ‘a hacker’ has very little to do with computer crime. Instead, the word ‘hacker’ defines someone who is motivated to solve problems through playful creativity and, often, displays of wit—and, of course, proficiency with techniques. It just so happens that the techniques uncovered by computer hackers also have applications elsewhere in society, a trend that continues to this day with the increase in interest in a range of 'hacker-esque' activities. Whether it's the political activist group Anonymous who directly employ techniques of subversion to further their varied agendas (Coleman 2014), or the more benign 'Maker' movement that champions a Do-It-Yourself approach to technology and hardware. The articles included in this issue of the M/C Journal explore a variety of techniques as they manifest through a specific medium. Each article presents a case study that answers Katherine Hayles' (2004) call for more "media-specific analysis" in cultural and critical theory. Liam Cole Young anchors this issue with his discussion of the relationship of technology to culture. Young charts the origins and history of a branch of German media studies that informs what we now call ‘cultural techniques’ or Kulturtechniken. Young invites his readers to reconsider the technology-culture relationship by rethinking Kulturtechniken so often misappropriated as techniques of audience and content analysis. Specifically, Young seeks to reposition the frame of institutional media studies, thus providing an alternative to the fetishisation of audiences and content in favour of a view that is sensitive to the intellectual history of ‘cultural techniques’, bringing them in dialogue with an understanding of the material specificity of media formats and the material realities of logistical media. Peng Liu draws our attention to the bodily techniques and responses of the artist structured by Chinese painting and the Confucian perspective. Liu argues that his memories and experiences of the Forgotten City and Chinese culture impress themselves upon his mapping of the aesthetic as he paints. Focusing on the interrelation and resistances of the body-as-artist and the conceptual structures that inform his sense of self, Liu imagines and reflects upon himself as a Chinese-artist. César Albarrán Torres and Justine Humphry delve into the cultural politics and labour of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-control’ in relation to the expansion of gambling enabled by Internet-enabled mobile devices. Torres and Humphry suggest that recent policy decisions enacted by neo-liberal governance in Australia has resulted in attempts to regulate or interrupt gambling addiction. In so doing, they argue that these policies have reconfigured the self-discipline of the subject-state relation in the Australian context. Nicole Pepperell and Duncan Law take us into the recent history of the faith in Internet technology as a progressive force of economic, legal, political and social emancipation. Examining the politics of the Internet’s divergent potentials, Pepperell and Law suggest that rhetorical, social and politics techniques have proven themselves decisive in the success or failure of realising the Internet’s emancipatory potential. They note that it is not without irony that recognising the limitations of politicised technologies may have a positive impact on the manifestation of private freedoms. To close this special issue, Jamileh Kadivar turns her gaze to the case of techniques of surveillance and counter-surveillance in Iran during the non-violent protests of the Iranian Green Movement in 2009. Kadivar argues that the centrality of surveillance for a convergent media environment cannot be understated, and its operation and function served to target and repress protest and dissent in Iran during the northern hemisphere’s late autumn of 2009. Yet Kadivar notes the important role of visibility in the contestations of surveillance in Iran and other dissenting movements such as Occupy. The editors of the 'technique' issue of M/C Journal wish to thank the M/C editorial team for the opportunity to gather articles under the theme. Thank you also to the scholars who provided constructive feedback during the peer-review process. And, most importantly, thank you to our authors without whom this issue would not be possible. References Coleman, Gabriella. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: the Story of Anonymous. United Kingdom: Verso Books, 2014. Hayles, N.Katherine. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Poetics Today 25.1 (2004): 67-90 McLuhan, H. Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Berkeley, Calif.: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London, UK: Collins, 1974.
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"The collapse of the synodal system (the end of the nineteenth – the beginning of the twentieth century): concepts of modern Orthodox historiography." V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University Bulletin "History of Ukraine. Ukrainian Studies: Historical and Philosophical Sciences", no. 30 (2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.26565/2227-6505-2020-30-06.
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Purpose of the study. To analyze the works of modern historians, reflecting the intra-church vision of the situation of the Orthodox Church in the Russian Empire from the end of the nineteenth century to 1917. Attention is focused on assessments of the late synodal system, the need to Church renew, Church freedom in the state, the clergy perception of the February Revolution and the new government. The concept of «modern Church / Orthodox historiography» is used in a broad and conditional sense. Itʼs represented by authors of various ideological and canonical directions of the twentieth – early twenty-first century. The research methodology is based on a comparative study of the historiographic concepts mainly of the second half of the 20th century – the beginning of the 21st century. We study the most influential generalizing texts representing the position of various groups in the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the works of Orthodox historians of emigration, the diaspora, Church dissidents. They have mostly liberal views and assessments of the Church process. The scientific novelty. The novelty of the study is determined by the weakness of the internal Church critical reflection, since the Church history functions within the framework of the apologetic and descriptive paradigm. Modern Church historiography is a specific phenomenon of historical science. Itʼs trying to combine two difficult tasks: religious apologetics and academic research. The article showed the negative aspects of this approach. Findings. The main lack of modern Church historiography is the indifference to non-political aspects of Church history. The potential of historical anthropology, intellectual history, the social history of ideas, and the history of mentality is ignored. As a result, many promising stories fall out of Сhurch historiography. These subjects are successfully investigated by secular historians. Common problem of the Orthodox historiography is thematic limitations, the tendency of the phenomenological «encapsulation» of the Church in the historical process, the conceptual dependence on Orthodox journalism at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. Also, the weak representativeness of the sources as a result of inattention to local documentary sources.
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Ilić Marković, Gordana. "I Feel Well on the Wrong Track: Milutin Doroslovac – Milo Dor." Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology 15, no. 1 (April 18, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.21301/eap.v15i1.2.
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That a writer should change the language in which he writes, or that he or she should write from the start in a non-native language, is an increasingly common phenomenon. Economic migrations in the latter half of the 20th century, intensified in the 1990s by migrations due to political conflict, have resulted in a larger number of writers who do not write in their native language. Also, the question of defining the concept of native language in bilingual or multilingual speakers is quite complex. The established definition according to which the mother tongue is the language that is unconsciously acquired in a natural social environment in childhood, does not necessarily correspond to language development in the diaspora, where the first language to be acquired is not always the language of the family. Authors who write in a language that is not their first are not a new phenomenon in literature; on the contrary, they are a historical constant as are migrations themselves. There have been a number of attempts to coin a name for this phenomenon. Terms like exile literature, gastarbeiter (in German-speaking countries) literature, migrant, intercultural, multicultural or transcultural literature have been used. In their works, writers who as individuals are multilingual but write only in a language which is not their first, often engage with themes inspired by their own or their ancestors' cultural milieu. Also, they often engage in translation, thus additionally contributing to the interweaving of two cultures. The Austrian writer Milo Dor who, apart from some early poetry in his mother tongue – Serbian, created his entire literary oeuvre in the German language, is one such author. He wrote in German, was fluent in several languages principally using German and Serbian for communication, and drew on his cultural sphere and experience for his literary themes and range of social engagement. This interconnectedness of cultures is reflected not only in the themes of Dor's prose works, characterized by biographism, but also in his translations and in his work as editor. For writers from the territory of Yugoslavia, Dor represented for decades an important link with German-speaking countries, working tirelessly to promote them both in Austria and in Germany.
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Pilter, Lauri. "Jüri Talvet maailmaluule tõlgendajana / Jüri Talvet’s Interpretations of World Poetry." Methis. Studia humaniora Estonica 14, no. 17/18 (January 10, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.7592/methis.v14i17/18.13211.
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Teesid: Tartu Ülikooli maailmakirjanduse professori, luuletaja, kirjandusteadlase ja hispaaniakeelse kirjanduse spetsialisti Jüri Talveti tõlketegevuse viljade hulka kuulub luulet ja proosat nii sajandeid vanast Hispaania klassikast kui ka 20. sajandil või tänapäeval romaani keeltes või inglise keeles loodud teostest. Käesolev artikkel keskendub sellele, kuidas professor Talvet on tõlgendanud luule ja poeetika, kuid ka kirjandusajaloo, iseäranis barokk-kirjanduse alaseid küsimusi oma kirjandusteaduslikes esseedes. Vaadeldakse ka tema tõlketegevuse mahtu ja tõlketöö põhimõtteid. Jüri Talvet (born in 1945) is a poet and a scholar of comparative literature, Chair Professor of World Literature at the University of Tartu. His numerous translations of poetry and poetical fiction from the Romance languages and, to a lesser extent, from English, reflect his views on world poetry. Those views are also expressed in his theoretical writings from the years of 1977 to 2015. Having studied English literature as the main subject at the University of Tartu, he early developed an interest in Spanish, in other Iberian languages, and in the Iberoamerican literatures. His translations from that area include works from medieval and early modern literature as well as notable literary achievements from the 20th century and the contemporary era. Talvet’s interpretations of Federico García Lorca and the “Latin American boom” authors are supported by profound insights into the philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics of the 17th century Spanish Baroque literature, known as the literary Golden Age of Spain. The influence which Talvet’s activities have exerted has widened the horizons of Estonia’s literary culture: while in the early 20th century, the previous German, Russian and Finnish leanings were supplemented by orientations to, and translations from, French and Italian literatures, Talvet has helped to enrich the Estonian literary landscape with the mentality and traditions of even more distant language areas, such as Castilian (Spanish), Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and the Latin American countries. In the section “Quevedo and Góngora” of this article, Talvet’s interpretation of some of the key issues of dispute in the Baroque literature of Spain are studied, based both on his theoretical essays and on his translations of the poetry of Francisco de Quevedo. Talvet has attempted to use the terms of the Baroque philosopher and writer Baltasar Gracián, agudeza, concepto (definable approximately as “conceit” or “wit”) and conceptismo, for the analysis of the late 20th century Estonian poetry. On that background, defnitions of conceptismo and cultismo (the other main school in Spanish Baroque poetry) are offered in this article, with implications that those definitions may have for understanding different styles and methods of poetry in general, and the characteristics of Talvet’s own poems and poetry translations in particular. To escape diffusion in pure sensuality and verbal indulgence, poetry has to rely on concepts as well as images. Talvet’s interpretations of poetry and poetical thinking are found to be close to conceptismo, or with a considerable amount of conceptuality inherent to them. The juxtaposition of paradoxical ideas from different levels of reality, social and psychic, is seen as the essential poetical method that Talvet refers to as he defines, quoting Yuri Lotman, the structural-semantic code of poetry as being “paradigmatic”. In the final section of the article, Talvet’s 23 book-length published translations are listed, including translations from Spanish, Catalan, English and French. The list does not include numerous translations of single poems or cycles of poetry that have appeared in literary journals, nor his contributions to anthologies of poetry, nor the translations from his native Estonian into a foreign language, such as Spanish or English, in which he has participated. His translations encompass lyrical works as well as fiction and plays. Talvet has translated classical European poetry, such as the sonnets of Petrarch and Quevedo and Provençal poems, as well as the rhymed poems of American poets into Estonian with complete metrical correspondence and full rhymes. However, in the latest decades Talvet has expressed scepticism in the sense and feasibility of attempting to convey the rhyming complexities of the major European literatures into Estonian, a language with a considerably smaller potential for finding full rhymes. Accordingly, his three translations of Spanish Baroque drama (by Calderón and Tirso de Molina) employ a liberal method of versification. In all his versatile activities as a poet, a translator, and a theorist of poetry, Professor Talvet has shown great devotion to developing and cultivating aesthetic values. A lot of his colleagues and students have benefited from his friendly advice. Thinking of his contributions to Estonia’s literary tradition, one may repeat and paraphrase the sentence that he used for the conclusion of his essay on the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu in 1977: “to write (and to translate) poetry is to work for the benefit of the people.”
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Fordham, Helen. "Curating a Nation’s Past: The Role of the Public Intellectual in Australia’s History Wars." M/C Journal 18, no. 4 (August 7, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1007.
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IntroductionThe role, function, and future of the Western public intellectual have been highly contested over the last three decades. The dominant discourse, which predicts the decline of the public intellectual, asserts the institutionalisation of their labour has eroded their authority to speak publicly to power on behalf of others; and that the commodification of intellectual performance has transformed them from sages, philosophers, and men of letters into trivial media entertainers, pundits, and ideologues. Overwhelmingly the crisis debates link the demise of the public intellectual to shifts in public culture, which was initially conceptualised as a literary and artistic space designed to liberate the awareness of citizens through critique and to reflect upon “the chronic and persistent issues of life, meaning and representation” (McGuigan 430). This early imagining of public culture as an exclusively civilising space, however, did not last and Jurgen Habermas documented its decline in response to the commodification and politicisation of culture in the 20th century. Yet, as social activism continued to flourish in the public sphere, Habermas re-theorised public culture as a more pluralistic site which simultaneously accommodates “uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention” (436) and operates as both a marketplace and a “site of communicative rationality, mutual respect and understanding (McGuigan 434). The rise of creative industries expanded popular engagement with public culture but destabilised the authority of the public intellectual. The accompanying shifts also affected the function of the curator, who, like the intellectual, had a role in legislating and arbitrating knowledge, and negotiating and authorising meaning through curated exhibitions of objects deemed sacred and significant. Jennifer Barrett noted the similarities in the two functions when she argued in Museums and the Public Sphere that, because museums have an intellectual role in society, curators have a public intellectual function as they define publics, determine modes of engagement, and shape knowledge formation (150). The resemblance between the idealised role of the intellectual and the curator in enabling the critique that emancipates the citizen means that both functions have been affected by the atomisation of contemporary society, which has exposed the power effects of the imposed coherency of authoritative and universal narratives. Indeed, just as Russell Jacoby, Allan Bloom, and Richard Posner predicted the death of the intellectual, who could no longer claim to speak in universal terms on behalf of others, so museums faced their own crisis of relevancy. Declining visitor numbers and reduced funding saw museums reinvent themselves, and in moving away from their traditional exclusive, authoritative, and nation building roles—which Pierre Bourdieu argued reproduced the “existing class-based culture, education and social systems” (Barrett 3)—museums transformed themselves into inclusive and diverse sites of co-creation with audiences and communities. In the context of this change the curator ceased to be the “primary producer of knowledge” (Barrett 13) and emerged to reproduce “contemporary culture preoccupations” and constitute the “social imagery” of communities (119). The modern museum remains concerned with explaining and interrogating the world, but the shift in curatorial work is away from the objects themselves to a focus upon audiences and how they value the artefacts, knowledge, and experiences of collective shared memory. The change in curatorial practices was driven by what Peter Vergo called a new “museology” (Barrett 2), and according to Macdonald this term assumes that “object meanings are contextual rather than inherent” or absolute and universal (2). Public intellectuals and curators, as the custodians of ideas and narratives in the contemporary cultural industries, privilege audience reception and recognise that consumers and/or citizens engage with public culture for a variety of reasons, including critique, understanding, and entertainment. Curators, like public intellectuals, also recognise that they can no longer assume the knowledge and experience of their audience, nor prescribe the nature of engagement with ideas and objects. Instead, curators and intellectuals emerge as negotiators and translators of cultural meaning as they traverse the divides in public culture, sequestering ideas and cultural artefacts and constructing narratives that engage audiences and communities in the process of re-imagining the past as a way of providing new insights into contemporary challenges.Methodology In exploring the idea that the public intellectual acts as a curator of ideas as he or she defines and privileges the discursive spaces of public culture, this paper begins by providing an overview of the cultural context of the contemporary public intellectual which enables comparisons between intellectual and curatorial functions. Second, this paper analyses a random sample of the content of books, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and transcripts of interviews drawn from The Australian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Institute, the ABC, The Monthly, and Quadrant published or broadcast between 1996 and 2007, in order to identify the key themes of the History Wars. It should be noted that the History War debates were extensive, persistent, and complex—and as they unfolded over a 13-year period they emerged as the “most powerful” and “most disputed form of public intellectual work” (Carter, Ideas 9). Many issues were aggregated under the trope of the History Wars, and these topics were subject to both popular commentary and academic investigation. Furthermore, the History Wars discourse was produced in a range of mediums including popular media sources, newspaper and magazine columns, broadcasts, blogs, lectures, and writers’ forums and publications. Given the extent of this discourse, the sample of articles which provides the basis for this analysis does not seek to comprehensively survey the literature on the History Wars. Rather this paper draws upon Foucault’s genealogical qualitative method, which exposes the subordinated discontinuities in texts, to 1) consider the political context of the History War trope; and 2) identify how intellectuals discursively exhibited versions of the nation’s identity and in the process made visible the power effects of the past. Public Intellectuals The underlying fear of the debates about the public intellectual crisis was that the public intellectual would no longer be able to act as the conscience of a nation, speak truth to power, or foster the independent and dissenting public debate that guides and informs individual human agency—a goal that has lain at the heart of the Western intellectual’s endeavours since Kant’s Sapere aude. The late 20th century crisis discourse, however, primarily mourned the decline of a particular form of public authority attached to the heroic universal intellectual formation made popular by Emile Zola at the end of the 19th century, and which claimed the power to hold the political elites of France accountable. Yet talk of an intellectual crisis also became progressively associated with a variety of general concerns about globalising society. Some of these concerns included fears that structural shifts in the public domain would lead to the impoverishment of the cultural domain, the end of Western civilisation, the decline of the progressive political left, and the end of universal values. It was also expected that the decline in intellectuals would also enable the rise of populism, political conservatism, and anti-intellectualism (Jacoby Bloom; Bauman; Rorty; Posner; Furedi; Marquand). As a result of these fears, the function of the intellectual who engages publicly was re-theorised. Zygmunt Bauman suggested the intellectual was no longer the legislator or arbiter of taste but the negotiator and translator of ideas; Michel Foucault argued that the intellectual could be institutionally situated and still speak truth to power; and Edward Said insisted the public intellectual had a role in opening up possibilities to resolve conflict by re-imagining the past. In contrast, the Australian public intellectual has never been declared in crisis or dead, and this is probably because the nation does not have the same legacy of the heroic public intellectual. Indeed, as a former British colony labelled the “working man’s paradise” (White 4), Australia’s intellectual work was produced in “institutionalised networks” (Head 5) like universities and knowledge disciplines, political parties, magazines, and unions. Within these networks there was a double division of labour, between the abstraction of knowledge and its compartmentalisation, and between the practical application of knowledge and its popularisation. As a result of this legacy, a more organic, specific, and institutionalised form of intellectualism emerged, which, according to Head, limited intellectual influence and visibility across other networks and domains of knowledge and historically impeded general intellectual engagement with the public. Fears about the health and authority of the public intellectual in Australia have therefore tended to be produced as a part of Antonio Gramsci’s ideological “wars of position” (Mouffe 5), which are an endless struggle between cultural and political elites for control of the institutions of social reproduction. These struggles began in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s over language and political correctness, and they reappeared in the 1990s as the History Wars. History Wars“The History Wars” was a term applied to an ideological battle between two visions of the Australian nation. The first vision was circulated by Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating, who saw race relations as central to 21st century global Australia and began the process of dealing with the complex and divisive Indigenous issues at home. He established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1991; acknowledged in the 1992 Redfern speech that white settlers were responsible for the problems in Indigenous communities; and commissioned the Bringing Them Home report, which was completed in 1997 and concluded that the mandated removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities throughout the 20th century had violated their human rights and caused long-term and systemic damage to Indigenous communities.The second vision of Australia was circulated by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, who, after he came to power in 1996, began his own culture war to reconstruct a more conservative vision of the nation. Howard believed that the stories of Indigenous dispossession undermined confidence in the nation, and he sought to produce a historical view of the past grounded in “Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the enlightenment and the institutions and values of British culture” (“Sense of Balance”). Howard called for a return to a narrative form that valorised Australia’s achievements, and he sought to instil a more homogenised view of the past and a coherent national identity by reviewing high school history programs, national museum appointments, and citizenship tests. These two political positions framed the subsequent intellectual struggles over the past. While a number of issues were implicated in the battle, generally, left commentators used the History Wars as a way to circulate certain ideas about morality and identity, including 1) Australians needed to make amends for past injustices to Indigenous Australians and 2) the nation’s global identity was linked to how they dealt with Australia’s first people. In contrast, the political right argued 1) the left had misrepresented and overstated the damage done to Indigenous communities and rewritten history; 2) stories about Indigenous abuse were fragmenting the nation’s identity at a time when the nation needed to build a coherent global presence; and 3) no apology was necessary, because contemporary Australians did not feel responsible for past injustices. AnalysisThe war between these two visions of Australia was fought in “extra-curricular sites,” according to Stuart Macintyre, and this included newspaper columns, writers’ festivals, broadcast interviews, intellectual magazines like The Monthly and Quadrant, books, and think tank lectures. Academics and intellectuals were the primary protagonists, and they disputed the extent of colonial genocide; the legitimacy of Indigenous land rights; the impact of the Stolen Generation on the lives of modern Indigenous citizens; and the necessity of a formal apology as a part of the reconciliation process. The conflicts also ignited debates about the nature of history, the quality of public debates in Australia, and exposed the tensions between academics, public intellectuals, newspaper commentators and political elites. Much of the controversy played out in the national forums can be linked to the Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families report Stolen Generation inquiry and report, which was commissioned by Keating but released after Howard came to office. Australian public intellectual and professor of politics Robert Manne critiqued the right’s response to the report in his 2001 Quarterly Essay titled “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and The Right”. He argued that there was a right-wing campaign in Australia that sought to diminish and undermine justice for Aboriginal people by discounting the results of the inquiry, underestimating the numbers of those affected, and underfunding the report’s recommendations. He spoke of the nation’s shame and in doing so he challenged Australia’s image of itself. Manne’s position was applauded by many for providing what Kay Schaffer in her Australian Humanities Review paper called an “effective antidote to counter the bitter stream of vitriol that followed the release of the Bringing Them Home report”. Yet Manne also drew criticism. Historian Bain Attwood argued that Manne’s attack on conservatives was polemical, and he suggested that it would be more useful to consider in detail what drives the right-wing analysis of Indigenous issues. Attwood also suggested that Manne’s essay had misrepresented the origins of the narrative of the Stolen Generation, which had been widely known prior to the release of the Stolen Generation report.Conservative commentators focused upon challenging the accuracy of those stories submitted to the inquiry, which provided the basis for the report. This struggle over factual details was to characterise the approach of historian Keith Windschuttle, who rejected both the numbers of those stolen from their families and the degree of violence used in the settlement of Australia. In his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 he accused left-wing academics of exaggerating the events of Aboriginal history in order to further their own political agenda. In particular, he argued that the extent of the “conflagration of oppression and conflict” which sought to “dispossess, degrade, and devastate the Aboriginal people” had been overstated and misrepresented and designed to “create an edifice of black victimhood and white guilt” (Windschuttle, Fabrication 1). Manne responded to Windschuttle’s allegations in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, arguing that Windschuttle arguments were “unpersuasive and unsupported either by independent research or even familiarity with the relevant secondary historical literature” (7) and that the book added nothing to the debates. Other academics like Stephen Muecke, Marcia Langton and Heather Goodall expressed concerns about Windschuttle’s work, and in 2003 historians Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark published The History Wars, which described the implications of the politicisation of history on the study of the past. At the same time, historian Bain Attwood in Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History argued that the contestation over history was eroding the “integrity of intellectual life in Australia” (2). Fractures also broke out between writers and historians about who was best placed to write history. The Australian book reviewer Stella Clarke wrote that the History Wars were no longer constructive discussions, and she suggested that historical novelists could colonise the territory traditionally dominated by professional historians. Inga Clendinnen wasn’t so sure. She wrote in a 2006 Quarterly Essay entitled “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” that, while novelists could get inside events through a process of “applied empathy,” imagination could in fact obstruct the truth of reality (20). Discussion The History Wars saw academics engage publicly to exhibit a set of competing ideas about Australia’s identity in the nation’s media and associated cultural sites, and while the debates initially prompted interest they eventually came to be described as violent and unproductive public conversations about historical details and ideological positions. Indeed, just as the museum curator could no longer authoritatively prescribe the cultural meaning of artefacts, so the History Wars showed that public intellectuals could not adjudicate the identity of the nation nor prescribe the nature of its conduct. For left-wing public intellectuals and commentators, the History Wars came to signify the further marginalisation of progressive politics in the face of the dominant, conservative, and increasingly populist constituency. Fundamentally, the battles over the past reinforced fears that Australia’s public culture was becoming less diverse, less open, and less able to protect traditional civil rights, democratic freedoms, and social values. Importantly for intellectuals like Robert Manne, there was a sense that Australian society was less able or willing to reflect upon the moral legitimacy of its past actions as a part of the process of considering its contemporary identity. In contrast right-wing intellectuals and commentators argued that the History Wars showed how public debate under a conservative government had been liberated from political correctness and had become more vibrant. This was the position of Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen who argued that rather than a decline in public debate there had been, in fact, “vigorous debate of issues that were once banished from the national conversation” (91). She went on to insist that left-wing commentators’ concerns about public debate were simply a mask for their discomfort at having their views and ideas challenged. There is no doubt that the History Wars, while media-orchestrated debates that circulated a set of ideological positions designed to primarily attract audiences and construct particular views of Australia, also raised public awareness of the complex issues associated with Australia’s Indigenous past. Indeed, the Wars ended what W.E.H Stanner had called the “great silence” on Indigenous issues and paved the way for Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous people for their “profound grief, suffering and loss”. The Wars prompted conversations across the nation about what it means to be Australian and exposed the way history is deeply implicated in power surely a goal of both intellectual debate and curated exhibitions. ConclusionThis paper has argued that the public intellectual can operate like a curator in his or her efforts to preserve particular ideas, interpretations, and narratives of public culture. The analysis of the History Wars debates, however, showed that intellectuals—just like curators —are no longer authorities and adjudicators of the nation’s character, identity, and future but cultural intermediaries whose function is not just the performance or exhibition of selected ideas, objects, and narratives but also the engagement and translation of other voices across different contexts in the ongoing negotiation of what constitutes cultural significance. ReferencesAlbrechtsen, Janet. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 84–92. Attwood, Bain. Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Bauman, Zygmunt. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post Modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge, CAMBS: Polity, 1987. Barrett, Jennifer. Museums and the Public Sphere. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.Bourdieu. P. Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Commonwealth of Australia. 1997.Carter, David. Introduction. The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2004. 1–11.Clendinnen, Inga. True Stories. Sydney: ABC Books, 1999.Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” Quarterly Essay 23 (2006): 1–82. Foucault, Michel, and Giles Deleuze. Intellectuals and Power Language, Counter Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. and trans. David Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. Gratton, Michelle. “Howard Claims Victory in National Culture Wars.” The Age 26 Jan. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/pm-claims-victory-in-culture-wars/2006/01/25/1138066861163.html›.Head, Brian. “Introduction: Intellectuals in Australian Society.” Intellectual Movements and Australian Society. Eds. Brian Head and James Waller. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1988. 1–44.Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, and Marc Silberman. “Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture: Jürgen Habermas and His Critics.” New German Critique 16 (Winter 1979): 89–118.Howard, John. “A Sense of Balance: The Australian Achievement in 2006.” National Press Club. Great Parliament House, Canberra, ACT. 25 Jan. 2006. ‹http://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/browse.php?did=22110›.Howard, John. “Standard Bearer in Liberal Culture.” Address on the 50th Anniversary of Quadrant, Sydney, 3 Oct. 2006. The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/john-howard-standard-bearer-in-liberal-culture/story-e6frg6zo-1111112306534›.Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: The Noonday Press, 1987.Keating, Paul. “Keating’s History Wars.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/05/1062549021882.html›.Macdonald, S. “Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction.” Ed. S. Macdonald. A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 1–12. Macintyre, Stuart, and Anna Clarke. The History Wars. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2003. ———. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 77–83.———. “Who Plays Stalin in Our History Wars? Sydney Morning Herald 17 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/16/1063625030438.html›.Manne, Robert. “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and the Right.” Quarterly Essay 1 (2001).———. WhiteWash: On Keith Windshuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Melbourne. Black Ink, 2003.Mark, David. “PM Calls for End to the History Wars.” ABC News 28 Aug. 2009.McGuigan, Jim. “The Cultural Public Sphere.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 8.4 (2005): 427–43.Mouffe, Chantal, ed. Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Melleuish, Gregory. The Power of Ideas: Essays on Australian Politics and History. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009.Rudd, Kevin. “Full Transcript of PM’s Apology Speech.” The Australian 13 Feb. 2008. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/full-transcript-of-pms-speech/story-e6frg6nf-1111115543192›.Said, Edward. “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” ABC Alfred Deakin Lectures, Melbourne Town Hall, 19 May 2001. Schaffer, Kay. “Manne’s Generation: White Nation Responses to the Stolen Generation Report.” Australian Humanities Review (June 2001). 5 June 2015 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-June-2001/schaffer.html›. Shanahan, Dennis. “Howard Rallies the Right in Cultural War Assault.” The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/howard-rallies-right-in-culture-war-assault/story-e6frg6nf-1111112308221›.Wark, Mackenzie. “Lip Service.” The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2004. 259–69.White, Richard. Inventing Australia Images and Identity 1688–1980. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847. Sydney: McCleay, 2002. ———. “Why There Was No Stolen Generation (Part One).” Quadrant Online (Jan–Feb 2010). 6 Aug. 2015 ‹https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2010/01-02/why-there-were-no-stolen-generations/›.
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Pausé, Cat, and Sandra Grey. "Throwing Our Weight Around: Fat Girls, Protest, and Civil Unrest." M/C Journal 21, no. 3 (August 15, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1424.
Full textAbstract:
This article explores how fat women protesting challenges norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces. We use the term fat as a political reclamation; Fat Studies scholars and fat activists prefer the term fat, over the normative term “overweight” and the pathologising term “obese/obesity” (Lee and Pausé para 3). Who is and who isn’t fat, we suggest, is best left to self-determination, although it is generally accepted by fat activists that the term is most appropriately adopted by individuals who are unable to buy clothes in any store they choose. Using a tweet from conservative commentator Ann Coulter as a leaping-off point, we examine the narratives around women in the public sphere and explore how fat bodies might transgress further the norms set by society. The public representations of women in politics and protest are then are set in the context of ‘activist wisdom’ (Maddison and Scalmer) from two sides of the globe. Activist wisdom gives preference to the lived knowledge and experience of activists as tools to understand social movements. It seeks to draw theoretical implications from the practical actions of those on the ground. In centring the experiences of ourselves and other activists, we hope to expand existing understandings of body politics, gender, and political power in this piece. It is important in researching social movements to look both at the representations of protest and protestors in all forms of media as this is the ‘public face’ of movements, but also to examine the reflections of the individuals who collectively put their weight behind bringing social change.A few days after the 45th President of the United States was elected, people around the world spilled into the streets and participated in protests; precursors to the Women’s March which would take place the following January. Pictures of such marches were shared via social media, demonstrating the worldwide protest against the racism, misogyny, and overall oppressiveness, of the newly elected leader. Not everyone was supportive of these protests though; one such conservative commentator, Ann Coulter, shared this tweet: Image1: A tweet from Ann Coulter; the tweet contains a picture of a group of protestors, holding signs protesting Trump, white supremacy, and for the rights of immigrants. In front of the group, holding a megaphone is a woman. Below the picture, the text reads, “Without fat girls, there would be no protests”.Coulter continued on with two more tweets, sharing pictures of other girls protesting and suggesting that the protestors needed a diet programme. Kivan Bay (“Without Fat Girls”) suggested that perhaps Coulter was implying that skinny girls do not have time to protest because they are too busy doing skinny girl things, like buying jackets or trying on sweaters. Or perhaps Coulter was arguing that fat girls are too visible, too loud, and too big, to be taken seriously in their protests. These tweets provide a point of illustration for how fat women protesting challenge norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces While Coulter’s tweet was most likely intended as a hostile personal attack on political grounds, we find it useful in its foregrounding of gender, bodies and protest which we consider in this article, beginning with a review of fat girls’ role in social justice movements.Across the world, we can point to fat women who engage in activism related to body politics and more. Australian fat filmmaker and activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater makes documentaries, such as Aquaporko! and Nothing to Lose, that queer fat embodiment and confronts body norms. Newly elected Ontario MPP Jill Andrew has been fighting for equal rights for queer people and fat people in Canada for decades. Nigerian Latasha Ngwube founded About That Curvy Life, Africa’s leading body positive and empowerment site, and has organised plus-size fashion show events at Heineken Lagos Fashion and Design Week in Nigeria in 2016 and the Glitz Africa Fashion Week in Ghana in 2017. Fat women have been putting their bodies on the line for the rights of others to live, work, and love. American Heather Heyer was protesting the hate that white nationalists represent and the danger they posed to her friends, family, and neighbours when she died at a rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina in late 2017 (Caron). When Heyer was killed by one of those white nationalists, they declared that she was fat, and therefore her body size was lauded loudly as justification for her death (Bay, “How Nazis Use”; Spangler).Fat women protesting is not new. For example, the Fat Underground was a group of “radical fat feminist women”, who split off from the more conservative NAAFA (National Association to Aid Fat Americans) in the 1970s (Simic 18). The group educated the public about weight science, harassed weight-loss companies, and disrupted academic seminars on obesity. The Fat Underground made their first public appearance at a Women’s Equality Day in Los Angeles, taking over the stage at the public event to accuse the medical profession of murdering Cass Elliot, the lead singer of the folk music group, The Mamas and the Papas (Dean and Buss). In 1973, the Fat Underground produced the Fat Liberation Manifesto. This Manifesto began by declaring that they believed “that fat people are full entitled to human respect and recognition” (Freespirit and Aldebaran 341).Women have long been disavowed, or discouraged, from participating in the public sphere (Ginzberg; van Acker) or seen as “intruders or outsiders to the tough world of politics” (van Acker 118). The feminist slogan the personal is political was intended to shed light on the role that women needed to play in the public spheres of education, employment, and government (Caha 22). Across the world, the acceptance of women within the public sphere has been varied due to cultural, political, and religious, preferences and restrictions (Agenda Feminist Media Collective). Limited acceptance of women in the public sphere has historically been granted by those ‘anointed’ by a male family member or patron (Fountaine 47).Anti-feminists are quick to disavow women being in public spaces, preferring to assign them the role as helpmeet to male political elite. As Schlafly (in Rowland 30) notes: “A Positive Woman cannot defeat a man in a wrestling or boxing match, but she can motivate him, inspire him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him, and have power over him that he can never achieve over her with all his muscle.” This idea of women working behind the scenes has been very strong in New Zealand where the ‘sternly worded’ letter is favoured over street protest. An acceptable route for women’s activism was working within existing political institutions (Grey), with activity being ‘hidden’ inside government offices such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (Schuster, 23). But women’s movement organisations that engage in even the mildest form of disruptive protest are decried (Grey; van Acker).One way women have been accepted into public space is as the moral guardians or change agents of the entire political realm (Bliss; Ginzberg; van Acker; Ledwith). From the early suffrage movements both political actors and media representations highlighted women were more principled and conciliatory than men, and in many cases had a moral compass based on restraint. Cartoons showed women in the suffrage movement ‘sweeping up’ and ‘cleaning house’ (Sheppard 123). Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were celebrated for protesting against the demon drink and anti-pornography campaigners like Patricia Bartlett were seen as acceptable voices of moral reason (Moynihan). And as Cunnison and Stageman (in Ledwith 193) note, women bring a “culture of femininity to trade unions … an alternative culture, derived from the particularity of their lives as women and experiences of caring and subordination”. This role of moral guardian often derived from women as ‘mothers’, responsible for the physical and moral well-being of the nation.The body itself has been a sight of protest for women including fights for bodily autonomy in their medical decisions, reproductive justice, and to live lives free from physical and sexual abuse, have long been met with criticisms of being unladylike or inappropriate. Early examples decried in NZ include the women’s clothing movement which formed part of the suffrage movement. In the second half of the 20th century it was the freedom trash can protests that started the myth of ‘women burning their bras’ which defied acceptable feminine norms (Sawer and Grey). Recent examples of women protesting for body rights include #MeToo and Time’s Up. Both movements protest the lack of bodily autonomy women can assert when men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies for their entertainment, enjoyment, and pleasure. And both movements have received considerable backlash by those who suggest it is a witch hunt that might ensnare otherwise innocent men, or those who are worried that the real victims are white men who are being left behind (see Garber; Haussegger). Women who advocate for bodily autonomy, including access to contraception and abortion, are often held up as morally irresponsible. As Archdeacon Bullock (cited in Smyth 55) asserted, “A woman should pay for her fun.”Many individuals believe that the stigma and discrimination fat people face are the consequences they sow from their own behaviours (Crandall 892); that fat people are fat because they have made poor decisions, being too indulgent with food and too lazy to exercise (Crandall 883). Therefore, fat people, like women, should have to pay for their fun. Fat women find themselves at this intersection, and are often judged more harshly for their weight than fat men (Tiggemann and Rothblum). Examining Coulter’s tweet with this perspective in mind, it can easily be read as an attempt to put fat girl protestors back into their place. It can also be read as a warning. Don’t go making too much noise or you may be labelled as fat. Presenting troublesome women as fat has a long history within political art and depictions. Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic) was depicted as fat and ugly; she also reinforced an anti-suffragist position (Chenut 441). These images are effective because of our societal views on fatness (Kyrölä). Fatness is undesirable, unworthy of love and attention, and a representation of poor character, lack of willpower, and an absence of discipline (Murray 14; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 1).Fat women who protest transgress rules around body size, gender norms, and the appropriate place for women in society. Take as an example the experiences of one of the authors of this piece, Sandra Grey, who was thrust in to political limelight nationally with the Campaign for MMP (Grey and Fitzsimmons) and when elected as the President of the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union in 2011. Sandra is a trade union activist who breaches too many norms set for the “good woman protestor,” as well as the norms for being a “good fat woman”. She looms large on a stage – literally – and holds enough power in public protest to make a crowd of 7,000 people “jump to left”, chant, sing, and march. In response, some perceive Sandra less as a tactical and strategic leader of the union movement, and more as the “jolly fat woman” who entertains, MCs, and leads public events. Though even in this role, she has been criticised for being too loud, too much, too big.These criticisms are loudest when Sandra is alongside other fat female bodies. When posting on social media photos with fellow trade union members the comments often note the need of the group to “go on a diet”. The collective fatness also brings comments about “not wanting to fuck any of that group of fat cows”. There is something politically and socially dangerous about fat women en masse. This was behind the responses to Sandra’s first public appearance as the President of TEU when one of the male union members remarked “Clearly you have to be a fat dyke to run this union.” The four top elected and appointed positions in the TEU have been women for eight years now and both their fatness and perceived sexuality present as a threat in a once male-dominated space. Even when not numerically dominant, unions are public spaces dominated by a “masculine culture … underpinned by the undervaluation of ‘women’s worth’ and notions of womanhood ‘defined in domesticity’” (Cockburn in Kirton 273-4). Sandra’s experiences in public space show that the derision and methods of putting fat girls back in their place varies dependent on whether the challenge to power is posed by a single fat body with positional power and a group of fat bodies with collective power.Fat Girls Are the FutureOn the other side of the world, Tara Vilhjálmsdóttir is protesting to change the law in Iceland. Tara believes that fat people should be protected against discrimination in public and private settings. Using social media such as Facebook and Instagram, Tara takes her message, and her activism, to her thousands of followers (Keller, 434; Pausé, “Rebel Heart”). And through mainstream media, she pushes back on fatphobia rhetoric and applies pressure on the government to classify weight as a protected status under the law.After a lifetime of living “under the oppression of diet culture,” Tara began her activism in 2010 (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She had suffered real harm from diet culture, developing an eating disorder as a teen and being told through her treatment for it that her fears as a fat woman – that she had no future, that fat people experienced discrimination and stigma – were unfounded. But Tara’s lived experiences demonstrated fat stigma and discrimination were real.In 2012, she co-founded the Icelandic Association for Body Respect, which promotes body positivity and fights weight stigma in Iceland. The group uses a mixture of real life and online tools; organising petitions, running campaigns against the Icelandic version of The Biggest Loser, and campaigning for weight to be a protected class in the Icelandic constitution. The Association has increased the visibility of the dangers of diet culture and the harm of fat stigma. They laid the groundwork that led to changing the human rights policy for the city of Reykjavík; fat people cannot be discriminated against in employment settings within government jobs. As the city is one of the largest employers in the country, this was a large step forward for fat rights.Tara does receive her fair share of hate messages; she’s shared that she’s amazed at the lengths people will go to misunderstand what she is saying (Vilhjálmsdóttir). “This isn’t about hurt feelings; I’m not insulted [by fat stigma]. It’s about [fat stigma] affecting the livelihood of fat people and the structural discrimination they face” (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She collects the hateful comments she receives online through screenshots and shares them in an album on her page. She believes it is important to keep a repository to demonstrate to others that the hatred towards fat people is real. But the hate she receives only fuels her work more. As does the encouragement she receives from people, both in Iceland and abroad. And she is not alone; fat activists across the world are using Web 2.0 tools to change the conversation around fatness and demand civil rights for fat people (Pausé, “Rebel Heart”; Pausé, “Live to Tell").Using Web 2.0 tools as a way to protest and engage in activism is an example of oppositional technologics; a “political praxis of resistance being woven into low-tech, amateur, hybrid, alternative subcultural feminist networks” (Garrison 151). Fat activists use social media to engage in anti-assimilationist activism and build communities of practice online in ways that would not be possible in real life (Pausé, “Express Yourself” 1). This is especially useful for those whose protests sit at the intersections of oppressions (Keller 435; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 19). Online protests have the ability to travel the globe quickly, providing opportunities for connections between protests and spreading protests across the globe, such as SlutWalks in 2011-2012 (Schuster 19). And online spaces open up unlimited venues for women to participate more freely in protest than other forms (Harris 479; Schuster 16; Garrison 162).Whether online or offline, women are represented as dangerous in the political sphere when they act without male champions breaching norms of femininity, when their involvement challenges the role of woman as moral guardians, and when they make the body the site of protest. Women must ‘do politics’ politely, with utmost control, and of course caringly; that is they must play their ‘designated roles’. Whether or not you fit the gendered norms of political life affects how your protest is perceived through the media (van Acker). Coulter’s tweet loudly proclaimed that the fat ‘girls’ protesting the election of the 45th President of the United States were unworthy, out of control, and not worthy of attention (ironic, then, as her tweet caused considerable conversation about protest, fatness, and the reasons not to like the President-Elect). What the Coulter tweet demonstrates is that fat women are perceived as doubly-problematic in public space, both as fat and as women. They do not do politics in a way that is befitting womanhood – they are too visible and loud; they are not moral guardians of conservative values; and, their bodies challenge masculine power.ReferencesAgenda Feminist Media Collective. “Women in Society: Public Debate.” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 10 (1991): 31-44.Bay, Kivan. “How Nazis Use Fat to Excuse Violence.” Medium, 7 Feb. 2018. 1 May 2018 <https://medium.com/@kivabay/how-nazis-use-fat-to-excuse-violence-b7da7d18fea8>.———. “Without Fat Girls, There Would Be No Protests.” Bullshit.ist, 13 Nov. 2016. 16 May 2018 <https://bullshit.ist/without-fat-girls-there-would-be-no-protests-e66690de539a>.Bliss, Katherine Elaine. Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City. Penn State Press, 2010.Caha, Omer. Women and Civil Society in Turkey: Women’s Movements in a Muslim Society. London: Ashgate, 2013.Caron, Christina. “Heather Heyer, Charlottesville Victim, Is Recalled as ‘a Strong Woman’.” New York Times, 13 Aug. 2017. 1 May 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/heather-heyer-charlottesville-victim.html>.Chenut, Helen. “Anti-Feminist Caricature in France: Politics, Satire and Public Opinion, 1890-1914.” Modern & Contemporary France 20.4 (2012): 437-452.Crandall, Christian S. "Prejudice against Fat People: Ideology and Self-Interest." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66.5 (1994): 882-894.Damousi, Joy. “Representations of the Body and Sexuality in Communist Iconography, 1920-1955.” Australian Feminist Studies 12.25 (1997): 59-75.Dean, Marge, and Shirl Buss. “Fat Underground.” YouTube, 11 Aug. 2016 [1975]. 1 May 2018 <https://youtu.be/UPYRZCXjoRo>.Fountaine, Susan. “Women, Politics and the Media: The 1999 New Zealand General Election.” PhD thesis. Palmerston North, NZ: Massey University, 2002.Freespirit, Judy, and Aldebaran. “Fat Liberation Manifesto November 1973.” The Fat Studies Reader. Eds. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York: NYU P, 2009. 341-342.Garber, Megan. “The Selective Empathy of #MeToo Backlash.” The Atlantic, 11 Feb 2018. 5 Apr. 2018 <https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/02/the-selective-empathy-of-metoo-backlash/553022/>.Garrison, Edith. “US Feminism – Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave.” Feminist Studies 26.1 (2000): 141-170.Garvey, Nicola. “Violence against Women: Beyond Gender Neutrality.” Looking Back, Moving Forward: The Janus Women’s Convention 2005. Ed. Dale Spender. Masterton: Janus Trust, 2005. 114-120.Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Yale UP, 1992.Grey, Sandra. “Women, Politics, and Protest: Rethinking Women's Liberation Activism in New Zealand.” Rethinking Women and Politics: New Zealand and Comparative Perspectives. Eds. John Leslie, Elizabeth McLeay, and Kate McMillan. Victoria UP, 2009. 34-61.———, and Matthew Fitzsimons. “Defending Democracy: ‘Keep MMP’ and the 2011 Electoral Referendum.” Kicking the Tyres: The New Zealand General Election and Electoral Referendum of 2011. Eds. Jon Johansson and Stephen Levine. Victoria UP, 2012. 285-304.———, and Marian Sawer, eds. Women’s Movements: Flourishing or in Abeyance? London: Routledge, 2008.Harris, Anita. “Mind the Gap: Attitudes and Emergent Feminist Politics since the Third Wave.” Australian Feminist Studies 25.66 (2010): 475-484.Haussegger, Virginia. “#MeToo: Beware the Brewing Whiff of Backlash.” Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Mar. 2018. 1 Apr. 2018 <https://www.smh.com.au/national/metoo-beware-the-brewing-whiff-of-backlash-20180306-p4z33s.html>.Keller, Jessalynn. “Virtual Feminisms.” Information, Communication and Society 15.3(2011): 429-447.Kirston, Gill. “From ‘a Woman’s Place Is in Her Union’ to ‘Strong Unions Need Women’: Changing Gender Discourses, Policies and Realities in the Union Movement.” Labour & Industry: A Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work 27.4 (2017): 270-283.Kyrölä, Katariina. The Weight of Images. London: Routledge, 2014.Ledwith, Sue. “Gender Politics in Trade Unions: The Representation of Women between Exclusion and Inclusion.” European Review of Labour and Research 18.2 (2012): 185-199.Lyndsey, Susan. Women, Politics, and the Media: The 1999 New Zealand General Election. Dissertation. Massey University, 2002.Maddison, Sarah, and Sean Scalmer. Activist Wisdom: Practical Knowledge and Creative Tension in Social Movements. Sydney: UNSW P, 2006. Moynihan, Carolyn. A Stand for Decency: Patricia Bartlett & the Society for Promotion of Community Standards, 1970-1995. Wellington: The Society, 1995.Murray, Samantha. "Pathologizing 'Fatness': Medical Authority and Popular Culture." Sociology of Sport Journal 25.1 (2008): 7-21.Pausé, Cat. “Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat.” Somatechnics 21 (2012): 42-56.———. “Express Yourself: Fat Activism in the Web 2.0 Age.” The Politics of Size: Perspectives from the Fat-Acceptance Movement. Ed. Ragen Chastain. Praeger, 2015. 1-8.———. “Rebel Heart: Performing Fatness Wrong Online.” M/C Journal 18.3 (2015).Rowland, Robyn, ed. Women Who Do and Women Who Don’t Join the Women’s Movement. London: Routledge, 1984.Schuster, Julia. “Invisible Feminists? 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Jaakkola, Maarit. "Forms of culture (Culture Coverage)." DOCA - Database of Variables for Content Analysis, March 26, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.34778/2x.
Full textAbstract:
This variable describes what kind of concept of culture underlies the cultural coverage at a certain point of time or across time. The variable dissects the concept of culture into cultural forms that are being journalistically covered. It presupposes that each article predominantly focuses on one cultural genre or discipline, such as literature, music, or film, which is the case in most articles in the cultural beat that are written according to cultural journalists’ areas of specialization. By identifying the cultural forms covered, the variable delivers an answer to the question of what kind of culture has been covered, or what kind of culture has been represented. Forms of culture are sometimes also called artistic or cultural disciplines (Jaakkola, 2015) or cultural genres (Purhonen et al., 2019), and cultural classification (Janssen et al., 2011) or cultural hierarchy (Schmutz, 2009). The level of detail varies from study to study, according to the need of knowledge, with some scholars tracing forms of subculture (Schmutz et al., 2010), while others just identify the overall development of major cultural forms (Purhonen et al., 2019; Jaakkola, 2015a).
The concepts of culture can roughly be defined as being dominated by high cultural, popular cultural, or everyday cultural forms (Kristensen, 2019). While most culture sections in newspapers are dominated by high culture, and the question is rather about which disciplines, in the operationalization it is not always easy to draw lines between high and popular forms in the postmodern cultural landscape where boundaries are being blurred. Nevertheless, the major forms of culture in the journalistic operationalization of culture are literature, classical music, theatre, and fine arts. As certain forms of culture – such as classical music and opera – are focused on classical high culture, and other forms – such as popular music and comics – represent popular forms, distribution of coverage according to cultural forms may indicate changes in the cultural concept.
Field of application/theoretical foundation
The question of the concept of culture is a standard question in content analyses on arts and cultural journalism in daily newspapers and cultural magazines, posed by a number of studies conducted in different geographical areas and often with a comparative intent (e.g., Szántó et al., 2004; Janssen, 1999; Reus & Harden, 2005; Janssen et al., 2008; Larsen, 2008; Kõnno et al., 2012; Jaakkola, 2015a, 2015b; Verboord & Janssen, 2015; Purhonen et al., 2019; Widholm et al., 2019). The essence of culture has been theorized in cultural studies, predominantly by Raymond Williams (e.g., 2011), and sociologists of art (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952). In studying journalistic coverage of arts and culture, the concept of culture reveals the anatomy of coverage and whether the content is targeting a broader audience (inclusive concept of culture) or a narrow audience (exclusive or elitist concept of culture). A prevalent motivation to study the ontological dimension of cultural coverage is also to trace cultural change, which means that the concept of culture is longitudinally studied (Purhonen et al., 2019).
References/combination with other methods of data collection
Concept of culture often occurs as a variable to trace cultural change. The variable is typically coupled with other variables, mainly with representational means, i.e., the journalistic genre (Jaakkola, 2015), event type (Stegert, 1998), or author gender (Schmutz, 2009; Jaakkola, 2015b). Quantitative content analyses may also be complemented with qualitative analyses (Purhonen et al., 2019).
Sample operationalization
Cultural forms are separated according to the production structure (journalists and reviewers specializing in one cultural form typically indicate an increase of coverage for that cultural form). At a general level, the concept of culture can be divided into the following cultural forms: literature, music – which is, according to the newsroom specialization typically roughly categorized into classical and popular music – visual arts, theatre, dance, film, design, architecture and built environment, media, comics, cultural politics, cultural history, arts education, and other. Subcategories can be separated according to the interest and level of knowledge. The variable needs to be sensitive towards local features in journalism and culture.
Example study
Jaakkola (2015b)
Information about Jaakkola, 2015
Author: Maarit Jaakkola
Research question/research interest: Examination of the cultural concept across time in culture sections of daily newspapers
Object of analysis: Articles/text items on culture pages of five major daily newspapers in Finland 1978–2008 (Aamulehti, Helsingin Sanomat, Kaleva, Savon Sanomat, Turun Sanomat)
Timeframe of analysis: 1978–2008, consecutive sample of weeks 7 and 42 in five year intervals (1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008)
Info about variable
Variable name/definition: Concept of culture
Unit of analysis: Article/text item
Values:
Cultural form
Description
1. Fiction literature
Fiction books: fictional genres such as poetry, literary novels, thrillers, detective novels, children’s literature, etc.
2. Non-fiction literature
Non-fiction books: non-fictional genres such as textbooks, memoirs, encyclopedias, etc.
3. Classical music
Music of more high-cultural character, such as symphonic music, chamber music, opera, etc.
4. Popular music
Music of more popular character, such as pop, rock, hip-hop, folk music, etc.
5. Visual arts
Fine arts: painting, drawing, graphical art, sculpture, media art, photography, etc.
6. Theatre
Scene art, including musicals (if not treated as music, i.e. in coverage of concerts and albums)
7. Dance
Scene art, including ballet (if not treated as music, .e. in coverage of concerts and albums)
8. Film
Cinema: fiction, documentary, experimental film, etc.
9. Design
Design of artefacts, jewelry, fashion, interiors, graphics, etc.
10. Architecture
Design, aesthetics, and planning of built environment
11. Media
Television, journalism, Internet, games, etc.
12. Comics
Illustrated periodicals
13. Cultural politics
Policies, politics, and administration concerning arts and culture in general
14. Cultural history
Historical issues and phenomena
15. Education
Educational issues concerning different cultural disciplines
16. Other
Miscellaneous minor categories, e.g., lifestyle issues (celebrity, gossip, everyday cultural issues), and larger categories developed from within the material can be separated into values of their own
Scale: nominal
Intercoder reliability: Cohen's kappa > 0.76 (two coders)
References
Jaakkola, M. (2015a). The contested autonomy of arts and journalism: Change and continuity in the dual professionalism of cultural journalism. Tampere: Tampere University Press.
Jaakkola, M. (2015b). Outsourcing views, developing news: Changes of art criticism in Finnish dailies, 1978–2008. Journalism Studies, 16(3), 383–402.
Janssen, S. (1999). Art journalism and cultural change: The coverage of the arts in Dutch newspapers 1965–1990. Poetics 26(5–6), 329–348.
Janssen, S., Kuipers, G., & Verboord, M. (2008). Cultural globalization and arts journalism: The international orientation of arts and culture coverage in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. newspapers, 1955 to 2005. American Sociological Review, 73(5), 719–740.
Janssen, S., Verboord, M., & Kuipers, G. (2011). Comparing cultural classification: High and popular arts in European and U.S. elite newspapers. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 63(51), 139–168.
Kõnno, A., Aljas, A., Lõhmus, M., & Kõuts, R. (2012). The centrality of culture in the 20th century Estonian press: A longitudinal study in comparison with Finland and Russia. Nordicom Review, 33(2), 103–117.
Kristensen, N. N. (2019). Arts, culture and entertainment coverage. In T. P. Vos & F. Hanusch (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of journalism studies. Wiley-Blackwell.
Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Meridian Books.
Larsen, L. O. (2008). Forskyvninger. Kulturdekningen i norske dagsaviser 1964–2005 [Displacements: Cultural coverage in Norwegian dailies 1964–2005]. In K. Knapskog & L.O. Larsen (Eds.), Kulturjournalistikk: pressen og den kulturelle offentligheten (pp. 283–329). Scandinavian Academic Press.
Purhonen, S., Heikkilä, R., Karademir Hazir, I., Lauronen, T., Rodríguez, C. F., & Gronow, J. (2019). Enter culture, exit arts? The transformation of cultural hierarchies in European newspaper culture sections, 1960–2010. Routledge.
Reus, G., & Harden, L. (2005). Politische ”Kultur”: Eine Längsschnittanalyse des Zeitungsfeuilletons von 1983 bis 2003 [Political ‘culture’: A longitudinal analysis of culture pages, 1983–2003]. Publizistik, 50(2), 153–172.
Schmutz, V. (2009). Social and symbolic boundaries in newspaper coverage of music, 1955–2005: Gender and genre in the US, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Poetics, 37(4), 298–314.
Schmutz, V., van Venrooij, A., Janssen, S., & Verboord, M. (2010). Change and continuity in newspaper coverage of popular music since 1955: Evidence from the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Popular Music and Society, 33(4), 505–515.
Stegert, G. (1998). Feuilleton für alle: Strategien im Kulturjournalismus der Presse [Feuilleton for all: Strategies in cultural journalism of the daily press]. Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Szántó, A., Levy, D. S., & Tyndall, A. (Eds.). (2004). Reporting the arts II: News coverage of arts and culture in America. National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP).
Verboord, M., & Janssen, J. (2015). Arts journalism and its packaging in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, 1955–2005. Journalism Practice, 9(6), 829–852.
Widholm, A., Riegert, K., & Roosvall, A. (2019). Abundance or crisis? Transformations in the media ecology of Swedish cultural journalism over four decades. Journalism. Advance online publication August, 6. Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919866077
Williams, R. (2011). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Routledge. (Original work published 1976).
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Bachmann, Goetz, and Andreas Wittel. "Enthusiasm as Affective Labour: On the Productivity of Enthusiasm in the Media Industry." M/C Journal 12, no. 2 (May 9, 2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.147.
Full textAbstract:
Longing on a large scale is what makes history.Don DeLillo, UnderworldIntroductionWhile the media industries have been rather thoroughly dissected for their capacity to generate enthusiasm through well-honed practices of marketing and patterns of consumerism, any analysis of the shift underway to capture and modulate the ‘enthusiastic’ and affective labour of media industry practitioners themselves may still have much to learn by reaching back to the long tradition in Western philosophy: a tradition, starting with the Greeks that has almost always contrasted enthusiasm with reason (Heyd). To quote Hume: “Hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance, are … the true sources of enthusiasm” (73). Hume’s remarks are contextualised in protestant theological debates of the 18th century, where enthusiasm was a term for a religious practice, in which God possesses the believer. Especially English preachers and theologians were putting considerable energy into demonising this far too ecstatic form of belief in god (Heyd). This ambivalent attitude towards enthusiasm time-travels from the Greeks and the Enlightenment period straight into the 20th century. In 1929, William Henry Schoenau, an early author of self-help literature for the white-collar worker, aimed to gain a wider audience with the title: “Charm, Enthusiasm and Originality - their Acquisition and Use”. According to him, enthusiasm is necessary for the success of the salesman, and has to be generated by techniques such as a rigorous special diet and physical exercises of his facial muscles. But it also has to be controlled:Enthusiasm, when controlled by subtle repression, results in either élan, originality, magnetism, charm or “IT”, depending on the manner of its use. Uncontrolled enthusiasm results in blaring jazz, fanaticism and recklessness. A complete lack of enthusiasm produces the obsequious waiter and the uneducated street car conductor. (7)Though William Henry Schoenau got rather lost in his somewhat esoteric take on enthusiasm – for him it was a result of magnetic and electric currents – we argue that Schoenau had a point: Enthusiasm is a necessary affect in many forms of work, and especially so in the creative industries. It has to be generated, it sometimes has to be enacted, and it has also to be controlled. However, we disagree with Schoenau in one important issue: For us, enthusiasm can only be controlled up to a certain degree. Enthusiasm in the Creative IndustriesSchoenau wrote for an audience of salesmen and ambitious managers. This was simultaneous with the rise of Fordism. Most labour in Fordism was routine labour with the assembly line as its iconic representation. In mass-production itself, enthusiasm was not needed, often not even wanted. Henry Ford himself noted dryly: “Why do I get a human being when all I want is a pair of hands” (Kane 128). It was reserved for few occupational groups situated around the core of the mass-produced economy, such as salesmen, inventors, and leaders like him. “Henry Ford had a burning enthusiasm for the motor car” (Pearle 196).In industrial capitalism enthusiasm on a larger scale was not for the masses. It could be found in political movements, but hardly in the realm of work. This was different in the first socialist state. In the 1920s and 1930s Soviet Union the leaders turned their experience in stimulating a revolutionary mindset into a formula for industrial development – famously documented in Dziga Vertov’s “Enthusiasm. Symphony of the Donbass”.In capitalist countries things changed with the crisis of Fordism. The end of mass production and its transformation to flexible specialisation (Piore/Sabel) prepared the ground for a revival of enthusiasm on a large scale. Post-industrial economies rely on permanent innovation. Now discourses in media, management, and academia emphasise the relevance of buzzwords such as flexibility, adaptability, change, youth, speed, fun, and creativity. In social science debates around topics such as the cultural economy (Ray/Sayers, Cook et al., du Gay/Pryke, Amin/Thrift), affective labour (Lazzarato, Hardt/Negri, Virno) and creative industries (Florida, Hartley) gained in momentum (for an interesting take on enthusiasm see Bröckling). Enthusiasm has become an imperative for most professions. Those who are not on fire are in danger of getting fired. Producing and Consuming EnthusiasmOur interest in enthusiasm as affective labour emerged in an ethnographic and experimental project that we conducted in 2003-2007 in London’s creative industries. The project brought together three industrial and one academic partner to produce a reality TV show tailor-made for IPTV (internet-protocol-based television). During this project we encountered enthusiasm in many forms. Initially, we were faced with the need to be enthusiastic, while we established the project coalition. To be convincing, we had to pitch the commercial potential of such a project enthusiastically to our potential partners, and often we had to cope with rejections and start the search and pitch again (Caldwell). When the project coalition was set up, we as academic partners managed the network. In the following two years we had to cope with our partner’s different directions, different rhythms and different styles of enthusiasm. The TV producer for example had different ways to express excitement than the new media firm. Such differences resulted in conflicts and blockades, and part of our task as project managers was to rebuild an enthusiastic spirit after periods of frustration. At the same time enthusiasm was one of the ingredients of the digital object that we produced: `Real’ emotions form the material of most reality TV shows (Grindstaff). Affects are for reality TV, what steel was for a Fordist factory. We needed an enthusiastic audience as part of the filmed material. There is thus a need to elicit, select, engineer and film such emotions. To this aim we engaged with the participants and the audience in complex ways, sometimes by distancing ourselves, other times by consciously manipulating them, and at even other times by sharing enthusiasm (similar processes in respect to other emotions are ethnographically described in Hesmondhalgh/Baker). Generating and managing enthusiasm is obviously a necessary part of affective labour in the creative industries. However, just as Hesmondhalgh/Baker indicate, this seemingly simple claim is problematic.Affective Labour as Practice‘Affective labour’ is a term that describes labour through its products: ‘A feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion’ (Hardt/Negri 292-293). Thus, the term ‘affective labour’ usually describes a sector by the area of human endeavour, which it commodifies. But the concept looses its coherence, if it is used to describe labour by its practice (for an analogue argument see Dowling). The latter is what interests us. Such a usage will have to re-introduce the notion of the working subject. To see affective labour as a practice should enable us to describe in more detail, how enthusiasm shapes the becoming of a cultural object. Who employed affect when and what kinds of affects in which way? Analysing enthusiasm as social practice and affective labour usually brings about one of two contrasting perceptions. On the one hand one can celebrate enthusiasm – like Pekka Himanen – as one of the key characteristics for a new work ethic emerging alongside the Protestant Ethic. On the other hand we find critique of the need to display affects. Barbara Ehrenreich shows how a forced display of enthusiasm becomes a requirement for all office workers to survive in late capitalism. Judging from our experience these two approaches need to be synthesized: Much affective labour consists in the display of affects, in showing off, in pretending. On the other hand, enthusiasm can only realise its potential, if it is ‘real’ (as opposed to enacted).With Ehrenreich, Hochschild and many others we think that an analysis of affective labour as a practice needs to start with a notion of expression. Enthusiasm can be expressed through excited gestures, rapid movements, raised voices, eyes wide open, clapping hands, speech. For us it was often impossible to separate which expression was ‘genuine’ and which was enacted. Judging from introspection, it is probable that many actors had a similar experience to ours: They mixed some genuine enthusiasm with more or less enforced forms of re-enactment. Perhaps re-enactment turned to a ‘real’ feeling: We enacted ourselves into an authentic mood - an effect that is also described as “deep acting” (Grandey). What can happen inside us, can also happen in social situations. German philosopher Max Scheler went to substantial lengths to make a case for the contagiousness of affects, and enthusiasm is one of the most contagious affects. Mutual contagiousness of enthusiasm can lead to collective elation, with or without genuine enthusiasm of all members. The difference of real, authentic affects and enacted affects is thus not only theoretically, but also empirically rather problematic. It is impossible to make convincing claims about the degree of authenticity of an affect. However, it is also impossible to ignore this ambivalence. Both ‘authentic’ and ‘faked’ enthusiasm can be affective labour, but they differ hugely in terms of their productive capacities.Enthusiasm as Productive ForceWhy is enthusiasm so important in the first place? The answer is threefold. Firstly, an enthusiastic worker is more productive. He or she will work more intensively, put in more commitment, is likely to go the so-called extra mile. Enthusiasm can create a surplus of labour and a surplus of value, thus a surplus of productivity. Secondly enthusiasm is part of the creative act. It can unleash energies and overcome self-imposed limitations. Thirdly enthusiasm is future-oriented, a stimulus for investment, always risky. Enthusiasm can be the affective equivalent of venture capital – but it is not reified in capital, but remains incorporated in labour. Thus enthusiasm not only leads to an increase of productivity, it can be productive itself. This is what makes it to one of the most precious commodities in the creative industries. To make this argument in more detail we need to turn to one of the key philosophers of affect.Thinking Enthusiasm with SpinozaFor Spinoza, all affects are derivatives of a first basic drive or appetite. Desire/appetite is the direct equivalent of what Spinoza calls Conatus: Our striving to increase our power. From this starting point, Spinoza derives two basic affects: pleasure/joy and sadness/pain. Pleasure/joy is the result of an increase of our power, and sadness/pain is the result of its decrease. Spinoza explains all other affects through this basic framework. Even though enthusiasm is not one of the affects that Spinoza mentions, we want to suggest that Spinoza’s approach enables us to understand the productivity of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a hybrid between desire (the drive) and joy (the basic affect). Like hope or fear, it is future-oriented. It is a desire (to increase our power) combined with an anticipated outcome. Present and the future are tightly bound. Enthusiasm differs in this respect from its closest relatives: hope and optimism. Both hope and optimism believe in the desired outcome, but only against the odds and with a presumption of doubt. Enthusiasm is a form of ecstatic and hyper-confident hope. It already rewards us with joy in the present.With Spinoza we can understand the magical trick of future-oriented enthusiasm: To be enthusiastic means to anticipate an outcome of an increased power. This anticipation increases our power in the present. The increased power in the present can then be used to achieve the increased power in the future. If successful, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is this future-orientedness, which can make enthusiasm productive. Actions and PassionsIn its Greek origin (‘enthousiasmos’) to be enthusiastic meant to be possessed or inspired by a god. An enthusiast was someone with an intense religious fervour and sometimes someone with an exaggerated belief in religious inspiration. Accordingly, enthusiasm is often connected to the devotion to an ideal, cause, study or pursuit. In late capitalism, we get possessed by different gods. We get possessed by the gods of opportunity – in our case the opportunities of a new technology like IPTV. Obsessions cannot easily be switched on and off. This is part of affective labour: The ability to open up and let the gods of future-oriented enthusiasm take hold of us. We believe in something not for the sake of believing, but for the sake of what we believe in. But at the same time we know that we need to believe. The management of this contradiction is a problem of control. As enthusiasm now constitutes a precious commodity, we cannot leave it to mere chance. Spinoza addresses exactly this point. He distinguishes two kinds of affects, actions and passions. Actions are what we control, passions are what controls us. Joy (= the experience of increased power of acting) can also weaken, if someone is not able to control the affection that triggered the joy. In such a case it becomes a passion: An increase of power that weakens in the long run. Enthusiasm is often exactly this. How can enthusiasm as a passion be turned into an action? One possible answer is to control what Spinoza calls the ‘ideas’ of the bodily affections. For Spinoza, affections (affectiones) ‘strike’ the body, but affect (affectus) is formed of both, of the bodily affectiones, but also of our ideas of these affectiones. Can such ideas become convictions, beliefs, persuasions? Our experience suggests that this is indeed possible. The excitement about the creative possibilities of IPTV, for example, was turned into a conviction. We had internalised the affect as part of our beliefs. But we had internalised it for a prize: The more it became an idea the more stable it got, but the less it was a full, bodily affect, something that touched our nervous system. We gained power over it for the price that it became less powerful in its drive.Managing the UnmanageableIn all institutions and organisations enthusiasm needs to be managed on a regular basis. In project networks however the orchestration of affects faces a different set of obstacles than in traditional organizations. Power structures are often shifting and not formally defined. Project partners are likely to have diverging interests, different expectations and different views on how to collaborate. What might be a disappointing result for one partner can be a successful result for another one. Differences of interest can be accompanied by differences of the expression of enthusiasm. This was clearly the case in our project network. The TV company entered a state of hype and frenzy while pitching the project. They were expressing their enthusiasm with talk about prominent TV channels that would buy the product, and celebrities who would take part in the show. The new media company showed its commitment through the development of beautifully designed time plans and prototypes – one of them included the idea to advertise the logo of the project on banners placed on airplanes. This sort of enthusiastic presentation led the TV producer to oppose the vision of the new media’s brand developer: She perceived this as an example of unrealistic pipe dreams. In turn the TV producer’s repeated name-dropping led other partners to mistrust them.Timing was another reason why it seemed to be impossible to integrate the affective cohorts of all partners into one well-oiled machine. Work in TV production requires periods of heightened enthusiasm while shooting the script. Not surprisingly, TV professionals save up their energy for this time. In contrast, new media practitioners create their products on the go: hype and energy are spread over the whole work process. Their labour becomes materialised in detailed plans, concepts, and prototypes. In short, the affective machine of a project network needs orchestration. This is a question of management.As this management failed so often in our project, we could discover another issue in the universe of enthusiasm: Disappointed high spirits can easily turn into bitterness and hostility. High expectations can lead to a lack of motivation and finally to a loss of loyalty towards the product and towards other project partners. Thus managing enthusiasm is not just about timing. It is also about managing disappointment and frustration. These are techniques, which have to be well developed on the level of the self-management as well as group management.Beyond the ProjectWe want to conclude this paper with a scene that happened at the very end of the project. In a final meeting, all partners agreed – much to our surprise – that the product was a big success. At that time we as academic partners found this irritating. There were many reasons why we disagreed: we did not produce a new format, we did not get positive user feedback, and we could not sell the show to further broadcasters (our original aims). However, all of this did not seem to have any impact on this final assessment. At the time of the meeting this looked for us like surreal theatre. Looking back now, this display of enthusiasm was indeed perhaps a ‘rational’ thing to do. Most projects and products in the creative industries are not successful on the market (Frith). To recreate the belief that one will eventually be successful (McRobbie) seems to be the one task of affective labour that stands out at the end of the lifecycle of many creative project networks.References Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift, eds. The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.Broeckling, Ulrich. “Enthusiasten, Ironiker, Melancholiker. Vom Umgang mit der unternehmerischen Anrufung.” Mittelweg 36.4 (2008): 80-86.Caldwell, John Thornton. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 200. Cook, Ian, et al., eds. Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns. Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2000.Dowling, Emma. “Producing the Dining Experience: Measure, Subjectivity and the Affective Worker.” Ephemera 7 (2007): 117-132.Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream. London: Granta, 2005.Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2002.Du Gay, Paul. and Michael Pryke, eds. Cultural Economy. Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. London: Sage, 2002.Grandy, Alicia. “Emotion Regulation in the Workplace: A New Way to Conceptualise Emotional Labour.” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 5 (2000): 95-110.Grindstaff, Laura. The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.Hartley, John, ed. Creative Industries. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.Hesmondhalgh, David, and Sarah Baker. “Creative Work and Emotional Labour in the Television Industry.” Theory, Culture and Society 25.5 (2008): 97-119.Heyd, Michael. “Be Sober and Reasonable." The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995.Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic. London: Random House, 2002.Hume, David. “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm.” Essays, Moral Political and Literary, I.X.3. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1742/1987.Johnson, Gregory. “The Tree of Melancholy. Kant on Philosophy and Enthusiasm.” Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion. Eds. Chris L. Firestone and Stephen R. Palmquist. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006. 43-61.Kane, Pat. The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living. London: Pan Books, 2005.Lazzarato, Maurizio. "Verwertung und Kommunikation." Umherschweifende Produzenten. Eds. Negri et al., Berlin: ID Verlag, 1998.Lutz, Burkart. Der kurze Traum immerwährender Prosperität: Eine Neuinterpretation der industriell-kapitalistischen Entwicklung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1984.Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism. London, 1978.McRobbie, Angela. “From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at Work in the Cultural Economy.” Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. Eds. Paul du Gay and M. Pryke. London: Sage, 2001. 97-114.Pearle, Norman V. Enthusiasm Makes the Difference. Worl's Work: Kingswood and London, 1967.Piore, Michael, and Charles Sabel. Das Ende der Massenproduktion. Studie über die Requalifizierung der Arbeit und die Rückkehr der Ökonomie in die Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985.Ray, Larry, and Andrew Sayer, eds. Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn. London: Sage, 1999.Reich, Robert. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism. New York: Knopf, 1991.Scheler, Max. Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. Gesammelte Werke, VII. Bonn: Bouvier, 1973 [1913].Schoenau, William H. Charm, Enthusiasm and Originality: Their Acquisition and Use. Los Angeles: Eln Publishing, 1929.Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. The Collected Works of Spinoza I, trans. E. Curley. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1985. Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude. For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.
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Miletic, Sasa. "Acting Out: "Cage Rage" and the Morning After." M/C Journal 22, no. 1 (March 13, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1494.
Full textAbstract:
Introduction“Cage rage” is one of the most famous Internet memes (Figure 1) which made Nicolas Cage's stylised and sometimes excessive acting style very popular. His outbursts became a subject of many Youtube videos, supercuts (see for instance Hanrahan) and analyses, which turned his rage into a pop-cultural phenomenon. Cage’s outbursts of rage and (over)acting are, according to him (Freeman), inspired by German expressionism as in films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). How should this style of acting and its position within the context of the Hollywood industry today be read in societal and political sense? Is “Cage rage” a symptom of our times? Rage might be a correct reaction to events such the financial crisis or the election of Donald Trump, but the question should also be posed, what comes after the rage, or as Slavoj Žižek often puts it, what comes the “morning after” (the revolution, the protests)?Fig. 1: One of the “Cage Rage” MemesDo we need “Cage rage” as a pop cultural reminder that, to paraphrase Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987), rage, for a lack of a better word, is good, or is it here to remind us, that it is a sort of an empty signifier that can only serve for catharsis on an individual level? Žižek, in a talk he gave in Vienna, speaks about rage in the context of revolutions:Rage, rebellion, new power, is a kind of a basic triad of every revolutionary process. First there is chaotic rage, people are not satisfied, they show it in a more or less violent way, without any clear goal and organisation. Then, when this rage gets articulated, organised, we get rebellion, with a minimal organisation and more or less clear awareness of who the enemy is. Finally, if rebellion succeeds, the new power confronts the immense task of organising the new society. The problem is that we almost never get this triad in its logical progression. Chaotic rage gets diluted or turns into rightist populism, rebellion succeeds but loses steam. (“Rage, Rebellion, New Power”)This means that, on the one hand, that rage could be effective. If we look at current events, we can witness the French president Emanuel Macron (if only partially) giving in to some of the demands of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protesters. In the recent past, the events of “Arab spring” are reminders of a watershed moment in the history of the participating nations; going back to the year 2000, Slobodan Milošević's regime in Serbia was toppled by the rage of the people who could not put up with his oligarchic rule — alongside international military intervention.On the other hand, all the outrage on the streets and in the media cannot simply “un-elect” or impeach Donald Trump from his position as the American President. It appears that President Trump seems to thrive on the liberal outrage against him, at the same time perpetuating outrage among his supporters against liberals and progressives in general. If we look back at the financial crisis of 2008 and the Occupy Wall Street movement, despite the outrage on the streets, the banks were bailed out and almost no one went to prison (Shephard). Finally, in post-Milošević Serbia, instead of true progressive changes taking place, the society continues to follow similar nationalistic patterns.It seems that many movements fail after expressing rage/aggression, a reaction against something or someone. Another recent example is Greece, where after the 2015 referendum, the left-wing coalition SYRIZA complied to the austerity measures of the Eurozone, thereby ignoring the will of the people, prompting its leaders Varoufakis and Tsipras falling out and the latter even being called a ‘traitor.’ Once more it turned out that, as Žižek states, “rage is not the beginning but also the outcome of failed emancipatory projects” ("Rage, Rebellion, New Power").Rage and IndividualismHollywood, as a part of the "cultural industry" (Adorno and Horkheimer), focuses almost exclusively on the individual’s rage, and even when it nears a critique of capitalism, the culprit always seems to be, like Gordon Gekko, an individual, a greedy or somehow depraved villain, and not the system. To illustrate this point, Žižek uses an example of The Fugitive (1993), where a doctor falsifies medical data for a big pharmaceutical company. Instead of making his character,a sincere and privately honest doctor who, because of the financial difficulties of the hospital in which he works, was lured into swallowing the bait of the pharmaceutical company, [the doctor is] transformed into a vicious, sneering, pathological character, as if psychological depravity […] somehow replaces and displaces the anonymous, utterly non-psychological drive of capital. (Violence 175)The violence that ensues–the hero confronting and beating up the bad guy–is according to Žižek mere passage a l’acte, an acting out, which at the same time, “serves as a lure, the very vehicle of ideological displacement” (Violence 175). The film, instead of pointing to the real culprit, in this case the capitalist pharmaceutical company diverts our gaze to the individual, psychotic villain.Other ‘progressive’ films that Hollywood has to offer chose individual rage, like in Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume I and II (2003/2004), with the story centred around a very personal revenge of a woman against her former husband. It is noted here that most of Nicholas Cage’s films, including his big budget movies and his many B-movies, remain outside the so-called ethos of “liberal Hollywood” (Powers, Rothman and Rothman). Conservative in nature, they support radical individualism, somewhat paradoxically combined with family values. This composite functions well values that go hand-in-hand with neoliberal capitalism. Surprisingly, this was pointed out by the guru of (neo)liberalism in global economy, by Milton Friedman: “as liberals, we take freedom of the individual, or perhaps the family, as our ultimate goal in judging social arrangements” (12). The explicit connections between capitalism, family and commercial film was noted earlier by Rudolf Arnheim (168). Family and traditional male/female roles therefore play an important role in Cage's films, by his daughter's murder in Tokarev (2014, alternative title: Rage); the rape of a young woman and Cage’s love interest in Vengeance: A Love Story (2017); the murder of his wife in Mandy (2018).The audience is supposed to identify with the plight of the father/husband plight, but in the case of Tokarev, it is precisely Cage's exaggerated acting that opens up a new possibility, inviting a different viewpoint on rage/revenge within the context of that film.Tokarev/RageAmong Cage's revenge films, Tokarev/Rage has a special storyline since it has a twist ending – it is not the Russian mafia, as he first suspected, but Cage’s own past that leads to the death of his daughter, as she and her friends find a gun (a Russian-made gun called ‘Tokarev’) in his house. He kept the gun as a trophy from his days as a criminal, and the girls start fooling around with it. The gun eventually goes off and his daughter gets shot in the head by her prospective boyfriend. After tracking down Russian mobsters and killing some of them, Cage’s character realises that his daughter’s death is in fact his own fault and it is his troubled past that came back to haunt him. Revenge therefore does not make any sense, rage turns into despair and his violence acts were literally meaningless – just acting out.Fig. 2: Acting Out – Cage in Tokarev/RageBut within the conservative framework of the film: the very excess of Cage’s acting, especially in the case of Tokarev/Rage, can be read as a critique of the way Hollywood treats these kinds of stories. Cage’s character development points out the absurdity of the exploitative way B-grade movies deal with such subjects, especially the way family is used in order to emotionally manipulate the audience. His explicit and deliberate overacting in certain scenes spits in the face of nuanced performances that are considered as “good acting.” Here, a more subdued performance that delivered a ‘genuine’ character portrayal in conflict, would bring an ideological view into play. “Cage Rage” seems to (perhaps without knowing it) unmask the film’s exploitation of violence. This author finds that Cage’s performance suffices to tear through the wall of the screen and he takes giant steps, crossing over boundaries by his embarrassing and awkward moments. Thus, his overacting and the way rage/revenge-storyline evolves, becomes as a sort of a “parapraxis”, the Freudian slip of the tongue, a term borrowed by Elsaesser and Wedel (131). In other words, parapraxis, as employed in film analysis means that a film can be ambiguous – or can be read ambiguously. Here, contradictory meanings can be localised within one particular film, but also open up a space for alternate interpretations of meanings and events in other movies of a similar genre.Hollywood’s celebration of rugged individualism is at its core ideology and usually overly obvious; but the impact this could on society and our understanding of rage and outrage is not to be underestimated. If Cage's “excess of acting” does function here as parapraxis this indicates firstly, the excessive individualism that these movies promote, but also the futility of rage.Rage and the Death DriveWhat are the origins of Nicholas Cage’s acting style? He has made claims to his connection to the silent film era, as expressive overstating, and melodrama was the norm without spoken dialogue to carry the story (see Gledhill). Cage also states that he wanted to be the “California Klaus Kinski” (“Nicolas Cage Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters”). This author could imagine him in a role similar to Klaus Kinski’s in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampire (1979), a homage remake of the silent film masterpiece Nosferatu (1922). There remain outstanding differences between Cage and Kinski. It seems that Kinski was truly “crazy”, witnessed by his actions in the documentary My Best Fiend (1999), where he attacks his director and friend/fiend Werner Herzog with a machete. Kinski was constantly surrounded by the air of excessiveness, to this viewer, and his facial expressions appeared unbearably too expressive for the camera, whether in fiction or documentary films. Cage, despite also working with Herzog, does mostly act according to the traditional, method acting norms of the Hollywood cinema. Often he appears cool and subdued, perhaps merely present on screen and seemingly disinterested (as in the aforementioned Vengeance). His switching off between these two extremes can also be seen in Face/Off (1997), where he plays the drug crazed criminal Castor Troy, alongside the role of John Travolta’s ‘normal’ cop Sean Archer, his enemy. In Mandy, in the beginning of the film, before he goes on his revenge killing spree, he presents as a stoic and reserved character.So, phenomena like ‘Cage Rage’, connected to revenge and aggression and are displayed as violent acts, can serve as a stark reminder of the cataclysmic aspect of individual rage as integrated with the death drive – following Freud’s concept that aggression/death drive was significant for self-preservation (Nagera 48).As this author has observed, in fact Cage’s acting only occasionally has outbursts of stylised overacting, which is exactly what makes those outbursts so outstanding and excessive. Here, his acting is an excess itself, a sort of a “surplus” type of acting which recalls Žižek's interpretation of Freud's notion of the death drive:The Freudian death drive has nothing whatsoever to do with the craving for self-annihilation, for the return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension; it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of dying – a name for the “undead” eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain. (Parallax 62)Žižek continues to say that “humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things” (Parallax 62). This is very similar to the mode of enjoyment detected in Cage’s over-acting.ViolenceRevenge and vigilantism are the staple themes of mass-audience Hollywood cinema and apart from Cage’s films previously mentioned. As Žižek reports, he views the violence depicted in films such as Death Wish (1974) to John Wick (2014) as “one of the key topics of American culture and ideology” (Parallax 343). But these outbursts of violence are simply, again, ‘acting out’ the passage a l’acte, which “enable us to discern the hidden obverse of the much-praised American individualism and self-reliance: the secret awareness that we are all helplessly thrown around by forces out of our control” (Parallax 343f.).Nicholas Cage’s performances express the epitome of being “thrown around by forces out of our control.” This author reads his expressionistic outbursts appear “possessed” by some strange, undead force. Rather than the radical individualism that is trumpeted in Hollywood films, this undead force takes over. The differences between his form of “Cage Rage” and others who are involved in revenge scenarios, are his iconic outbursts of rage/overacting. In his case, vengeance in his case is never a ‘dish best served cold,’ as the Klingon proverb expresses at the beginning of Kill Bill. But, paradoxically, this coldness might be exactly what one needs in the age of the resurgence of the right in politics which can be witnessed in America and Europe, and the outrage it continuously provokes. ConclusionRage has the potential to be positive; it can serve as a wake-up call to the injustices within society, and inspire reform as well as revolution. But rage is defined here as primarily an urge, a drive, something primordial, as an integral expression of the Lacanian Real (Žižek). This philosophic stance contends that in the process of symbolisation, or rage’s translation into language, this articulation tends to open up inconsistencies in a society, and causes the impetus to lose its power. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the cycle of rage and the “morning after” which inevitably follows, seems to have a problematic sobering effect. (This effect is well known to anyone who was ever hungover and who therefore professed to ‘never drink again’ where feelings of guilt prevail, which erase the night before from existence.) The excess of rage before followed, this author contends, by the excess of rationality after the revolution are therefore at odds, indicating that a reconciliation between these two should happen, a negotiation, providing a passage from the primordial emotion of rage to the more rational awakening.‘Cage Rage’ and its many commentators and critics serve to remind us that reflection is required, and Žižek’s explication of filmic rage allows us to resist the temptation of enacting our rage that merely digresses to an ’acting out’ or a l'acte. In a way, Cage takes on our responsibility here, so we do not have to — not only because a catharsis is ‘achieved’ by watching his films, but as this argument suggests, we are shocked into reason by the very excessiveness of his acting out.Solutions may appear, this author notes, by divisive actors in society working towards generating a ‘sustained rage’ and to learn how to rationally protest. This call to protest need not happen only in an explosive, orgasmic way, but seek a sustainable method that does not exhaust itself after the ‘party’ is over. This reading of Nicholas Cage offers both models to learn from: if his rage could have positive effects, then Cage in his ‘stoic mode’, as in the first act of Mandy (Figure 3), should become a new meme which could provoke us to a potentially new revolutionary act–taking the time to think.Fig. 3: Mandy ReferencesAdorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. 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