Cultural Criticism

Beyonce is an image icon who presents three different identities in music videos: the singular self, the hybrid self, and the integrated self. Her representations call attention to class performances of racialized gender and sexuality by Black women. Drawing from hip-hop feminism, the author discusses how the singer's shift in representation signaled a shift in the cultural criticism produced about Beyoncé within a ten-year period.

Iran sends inconsistent messages to the world. Vehement factionalism and widespread disagreement in nearly everything from religion and politics to lifestyle and sexuality are evident inside the country. Drawing from the Freudian concept of the economics of libido as well as from Lacanian discourses, this article analyzes the historical experience of the decades following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. I focus on how the enforcement of moral puritanism and the symbolic decline of father figures have resulted in an imbalance of the economics of libido among Iranian subjects, as well as the absence of a master signifier capable of representing the discourse of the Master in a way that libidinal resources can be integrated into Iranian culture. Consequentially, a subversive discourse of the hysteric with an insatiable desire transformed into eternal, unanswerable questions has arisen, and this discourse predominates in the relationship between various factions in the country.
(Full-text access to a view-only version: https://rdcu.be/bPC1O )

Resumen.
En este trabajo, se presenta una reflexión teórica en torno a los retos metodológicos
en el estudio de sociedades donde la diferencia étnica y cultural es la condición
intrínseca y donde diferentes lógicas de transformación coexisten de manera tensa,
contradictoria y mutuamente constitutiva. El argumento central gira en torno a la
necesidad de que la mirada histórica se distancie de sus propios esquemas del
cambio, a fin de aproximarse a contextos donde la variabilidad cultural es simultánea
en el tiempo y en el espacio. Se hará énfasis sobre la mirada de la múltiple alteridad
hacia el mundo del analista, la variación en el tiempo, las diferencias de otros
tiempos y otros espacios y las multiplicidades culturales solapadas en los mismos tiempos y espacios. Asimismo, se argumentará en pro de la relevancia de las
relaciones mutuamente dependientes, pero con horizontes contradictorios de estos
universos multiculturales, a fin de superar los obstáculos epistemológicos de la
Historia Unilineal.
Palabras clave: miradas analíticas, crítica cultural, sociedades multiétnicas

Abstract.
This article presents a theoretical reflection around the methodological challenges in
the study of societies where ethnic and cultural differences are intrinsic conditions,
and where different logics of transformation coexist in a tense, contradictory, and
mutually constitutive way. The main argument sustains that the historical glance
must create a distance from its own schemes of change to approach to contexts
where cultural variability is simultaneous in time and space. The main emphasis will
be on the multiple otherness towards the analyst’s world of reference, the variability
of time, the differences in other times and other spaces, as well as the overlapping
between cultural multiplicities in the same times and spaces. In addition, there will
be an argument in favour of the the relevance of the relations mutually dependants,
but with contradictory horizons between different multicultural universes, to go
beyond the epistemological obstacles of Unilinear History.

Keywords: analytical approaches, cultural critics, multiethnic societies.

In Another Philosophy of History, J.G. Herder claims that his aim is not to compare and judge different cultures, but merely to describe and explain how each came into being and thus to adopt the standpoint of an impartial observer. I argue, however, that there is a tension between Herder's understanding of his own project—his stated doctrine of historicism and cultural relativism—and the way in which it is actually put into practice. That is, despite Herder's stated aims, he is nevertheless unable to avoid justifying premodern forms of life and making context-transcending evaluative judgments in the process of trying to understand cultures on their own terms and holding them up as exemplars vis à vis the Enlightenment. This tension presents the challenge of accounting for it in the most charitable and illuminating way. I argue that this goal can be achieved by appealing to the resources of the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, which enables us to disclose two enabling conditions for Herder's project of which he was not explicitly aware, viz., the internal connection between understanding and justification and the enabling character of prejudice as the condition for the possibility of understanding as such. In Another Philosophy of History, J.G. Herder develops a distinctive methodology for historical inquiry that poses a challenge to his Enlightenment contemporaries on the grounds that their methods radically distort and, as a result, fail to genuinely understand and learn from premodern cultures and civilizations. Against the assumptions of cultural superiority of Enlightenment historians, based on a historical narrative of linear progress which posits the Enlightenment as history's terminal point, Herder argues that no such comparative, context-transcending evaluative judgments can be made since every culture has to be understood on its own terms and evaluated on the basis of the criteria internal to each. By situating cultures within their own historical context, therefore, we can come to understand and appreciate the particular virtues distinctive of each. As such, according to Herder's historicism, the aim is not to compare and judge different cultures, but rather to describe and explain how each came into being; that is, to adopt the standpoint of an impartial observer in order to avoid the hubris of Enlightenment historians on the one hand, and the tendency to overly romanticize and 'pick favorites' among premodern cultures, on the other.

Ο Γκέοργκ Λούκατς είναι ευρέως γνωστός ως ένας από τους θεμελιωτές της μαρξιστικής φιλοσοφίας του 20ου αιώνα. Ως εκ τούτου, η πρώιμη φάση της διανοητικής του παραγωγής, η οποία προηγήθηκε της αιφνίδιας στράτευσής του στο κομμουνιστικό κίνημα στα τέλη του 1918, κατά κανόνα αγνοήθηκε από τους μελετητές του έργου του, τουλάχιστον μέχρι τα τέλη της δεκαετίας του ’60. Παρά την αύξηση του ερευνητικού ενδιαφέροντος στις επόμενες δεκαετίες, παραμένει και σήμερα ακόμα μια σχετικά αδιερεύνητη περίοδος του λουκατσιανού έργου.
Η παρούσα εργασία προσφέρει μια ενδελεχή κριτική ανασυγκρότηση του λεγόμενου «προμαρξιστικού έργου» του Λούκατς και καινοτομεί αναζητώντας την εσωτερική δυναμική των νεανικών ερευνών του, ανεξάρτητα από την κατοπινή στροφή του στον μαρξισμό. Η έμφαση δίνεται έτσι στα βασικά ερωτήματα τα οποία ανακινούνται στις εργασίες του Λούκατς για την κοινωνιολογία και την ιστορία της τέχνης, τη φιλοσοφία της τέχνης και του πολιτισμού, την ηθική και αισθητική φιλοσοφία, καθώς και την κοινωνική και πολιτική φιλοσοφία. Στον πυρήνα της ανασυγκρότησης τοποθετείται το ερώτημα για την ιστορικότητα και την αχρονικότητα των (αισθητικών, ηθικών κ.ά.) «μορφών», το οποίο απασχολούσε τον Λούκατς σε όλη αυτή την περίοδο. Ακριβώς τούτη την αντίθεση συμπυκνώνει το δίπολο «τραγωδία και ιστορία», ιδωμένη συγχρόνως από τη σκοπιά του αιτήματος για μια σύνθεση των δύο προοπτικών. Υπό αυτό το πρίσμα καθίσταται δυνατή μια εξαντλητική και συγχρόνως συνεκτική ανασύνθεση της συναρπαστικής διαδρομής του νεαρού Λούκατς μέσα από τα σημαντικότερα ρεύματα της αστικής διανόησης των αρχών του 20ου αιώνα. Στην ανά χείρας μελέτη τίθενται έτσι οι βάσεις για τη βαθύτερη κατανόηση του κριτικού δυναμικού της κατοπινής στροφής του Λούκατς στον μαρξισμό.

Mourning is German-Jewish novelist Grete Weil’s aesthetic, moral, and intellectual project. My intent in this paper is to explicate and defend that claim. Weil’s two major autobiographical novels, Meine Schwester Antigone (My Sister Antigone) and Der Brautpreis (The Bride Price) deal with complex issues of guilt, Jewish identity, and irreparable loss; Weil is concerned to mourn these losses through texts that explore and ask questions of them. I will also examine Weil’s collection of short stories, Spätfolgen (Aftershocks), published in 1992, to show that mourning remained a consistent preoccupation as Weil continued her late-life writing. Meine Schwester Antigone and Der Brautpreis appeared in German in 1984 and 1988, respectively, and looked backward. The Aftershocks stories are set in the contemporary now of the early 1990s and work through ways that the Holocaust pervades the lives of survivors and second-generation Jews without regard to proximity to the event.
Weil mourns Europe, the Jewish graveyard. She mourns her husband, Edgar (Waiki), a playwright murdered at Mauthausen, her fraught relationship with Jewish identity, the children thrown violently into the backs of Nazi death trucks in Amsterdam, the German language, her dog, her hijacked country, the Kulturnation and its classical, humanist traditions of intellect and art. She grieves that she was forced to confront her Jewishness by the Third Reich when her life as a fully secular and assimilated Berliner had been lovely. She grieves her old age and incapacitation, ugly streets, and the pain of no longer being able to look forward to a new Gide or Mann that she must read the moment it comes out. She mourns her unstructured days that are shot through with brutal memories that are not just recollections, but the stuff of her life, the ground of her consciousness and identity. “Weil implicitly and explicitly poses questions that explore the difficulties of her own case history. What does it mean for a person to insist on national identity after fleeing that country and being pursued in exile? What do the terms ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’ signify to a woman with no belief in the God of the Old Testament and no stake in the success of a post-Holocaust Jewish nation, yet whose husband was murdered because he was Jewish?”

In this article I try to articulate a critical assessment of the current geopolitical asset of Digital Humanities. This critique is based on one hand on data about the composition of government organs, institutions and principal journals of the field, and on the other hand on a general reflection on the cultural, political and linguistic bias of digital standards, protocols and interfaces. These reflections suggest that DH is not only a discipline and an academic discourse dominated materially by an Anglo-American élite and intellectually by a mono-cultural view, but that it lacks a theoretical model for reflecting critically on its own instruments. I conclude proposing to elaborate a different model of DH, based on the concept of knowledge as commons and the cultivation of cultural margins, as opposed to the present obsession with large-scale digitization projects and “archiving fever” that leads to an increase of our dependency on private industry products and, of course, funding.

"Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), ed. Jonatan Meir, Three volumes, Mosad Bialik, Jerusalem

Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), first published in Vienna in 1819, is one of the sharpest and wittiest pieces of Jewish literature written in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is perhaps the most important piece of Hebrew prose composed before the stories of Mendele Mocher Seforim. A sly and complex story deriding Hasidism and Hasidim, it is told through the correspondence between the beadles of Hasidic courts and contemporary rabbis, and it presents a dark picture of  avaricious frauds and swindlers whose main concern was control over territory and the souls of believers, a goal achieved by beguiling the authorities and attacking all opponents. Perl lends his book a ‘Hasidic’ feel both in its physical design and in its language, presenting a Maskilic version of In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov that lays Hasidism bare so that no reader will ever be able to look at that, or any other Hasidic book, in the same way again. In addition to the book’s satiric sting, which would have been enough to bring its readers a dual pleasure, Perl’s hints at contemporary people and places, hidden within anagrams and numerological tricks. With the unraveling of these clues, which also include the use of actual Hasidic sources, the book is a valuable, contemporary view of historical reality. A meticulous reading of the book may therefore open a window on the hidden worlds of Hasidism and the Haskalah at the start of the nineteenth century.


The first volume (Imagined Hasidism) serves as an introduction to the complex satirical writings of Josef Perl of Tarnopol (1773-1839). At the center of the book stands an analysis of the satires, Megaleh Temirin (1819) and Bochen Tzadik (1838), including a systematic treatment of the ‘characters’ in the central works and a discussion of the dozens of manuscripts to be found in the Perl Archive in Jerusalem. Perl’s writings are analyzed here in the fuller context of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in general and Maskilic and Hasidic literature in particular, as well as other polemical writings and governmental records critical of Hasidism. The study thus presents a complex and nuanced picture of the relationship between literature and history, between the anti-Hasidic reports and the more complicated historical reality, and lays the groundwork for further research into the genre of nineteenth-century Maskilic satire.

The second and third volumes (Megaleh Temirin) present for the first time an annotated edition of Megaleh Temirin. It is based on the first edition and the scattered manuscripts and it includes a comparison to its Yiddish translation. The book is accompanied by appendices on its origins and contents, including fundamental treatments of several passages: an explication of the encoded names, the Hasidic sources used by the author, and the variants found in the manuscripts and in the only edition of the book in Yiddish.

The editor of the book, Professor Jonatan Meir, teaches in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University. He has published several articles on the Haskalah of Eastern Europe, Hasidism, and a number of varied topics in twentieth-century Kabbalah.


Contents

Volume 1  - Critical Edition

Concerning this edition
Key personalities
Sefer Megale Temirin – Critical Edition


Volume 2 - Appendixes:
1. Glossary, Abbreviations, Acronyms
2. Explanation of the Speaking Names
3. Perl’s Hasidic Sources
4. Manuscripts of Sefer Megale Temirin
5. Yiddish Introduction to Sefer Megale Temirin
Bibliographic Abbreviations

-------------------------------
Reviews:
(1) Dan Meron, 2013, ‘Megaleh Temirin’, Kivunim Hadashim 29, 55 pages (Hebrew)
(2) David Assaf, 2014, ‘Hasidim will not Read it but Tear it’, Haaretz, Tarbut ve-Sifrut, p .6 (Hebrew) http://onegshabbat.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/blog-post_18.html
(3) Eliezer Brodt, 2014, 'New book Announcement- Megale Temirin', The Seforim Blog http://seforim.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/new-book-announcement-megale-temirin.html
(4) Matan Hermoni, 2014,  הסבתא המופקרת של הספרות העבריתHaaretz, Sfarim (Hebrew) http://www.haaretz.co.il/.premium-1.2382365
(5) Shinichi Yamamoto, 2015, 山本　伸一, "ヨナタン・メイール編著『想像のハシディズム』", ユダヤ・イスラエル研究　第28号  http://www.waseda.jp/assoc-jsjs/jistudies.html
(6) David Biale and David Assaf,, 2015, 'Revealer Revealed', Jewish Review of Books, pp. 17-21  http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1454/revealer-revealed/
(7) Hillel Halkin, 2015, "Sex, Magic, Bigotry, Corruption- and the First Hebrew Novel', Mosaic Magazine,  http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/05/sex-magic-bigotry-corruption-and-the-first-hebrew-novel/
(8) Tomer Persico, 2015, "Interview", Lula'at haEl Blog, http://tomerpersico.com/2015/08/10/meir_perl/

This is an interview I conducted with the late Mark Fisher, as occasion of the translation and publication of his book, "Capitalism Realism. Is There an Alternative?" into Spanish by Caja Negra Editora. The interview was done by email during the month of July 2016. This is the unpublished original English version of that interview.

Essa pesquisa analisa a contribuição do pensador galês Raymond Williams (1921-1988) para o pensamento social no contexto da segunda metade do século XX. Sua teoria, o materialismo cultural, argumentou a favor de abordagens não-abstratas das complexas relações entre cultura e sociedade, através de um entendimento da cultura como processo social e material. Articulada entre duas instâncias - o estudo do texto e da inserção de Williams no campo intelectual da época -, essa dissertação examina o desenvolvimento de suas formulações teóricas no decorrer de sua carreira em obras selecionadas e busca traçar relações dialéticas com o contexto de transformações e reconfigurações do pensamento radical no Reino Unido do período. O caso de Williams é significativo, pois o autor foi uma figura de destaque dentro da New Left britânica, além de ter tido um papel central na criação dos Estudos Culturais, dois processos marcantes na história ocidental contemporânea. Para além da relevância do tema dentro da história intelectual, entende-se como central a preocupação de Williams em articular práticas culturais e desenvolvimento histórico, tendo como objetivo forjar uma nova concepção de crítica. E a maneira como isso se deu, de modos distintos em diferentes marcos de sua trajetória intelectual, é um dos princípios norteadores da presente pesquisa.  Trata-se de um exercício que, em última instância, busca contribuir tanto para enriquecer o entendimento a respeito de um ambiente intelectual específico quanto para a epistemologia da crítica materialista em geral. A pesquisa contou com a análise das obras de Williams e de seus documentos pessoais e profissionais, localizados tanto no Richard Burton Archives, na cidade de Swansea no País de Gales, quanto na Weston Library, na cidade de Oxford, Inglaterra.

This is an English rewriting of the author's essay, most read in Italian: “Alcesti, la donna che visse due volte” ("Alcestis, the woman who lived twice"). It deals with the archaic myth and the disconcerting character of Alcestis. That is, with its long lasting success in the history of literature, art and music: from a homely and conservative to a homeless – just to say so – figure of woman, after her odd experience of death. Most probably such a duplicity is not only a modern invention, but already implicit in the classic dramatisation by Euripides, such as an “open source” archetype of the Western civilisation.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Maskilic journals increased their publication of anti-Hasidic satires. From the eighteen-sixties onward, this literature came primarily as a response to the revival in the publishing of Hasidic hagiography and to the spread of Hasidism into new territory. To this point, no complete review or even general survey has been performed on this extensive polemical literature, despite the fact that it has much to teach us about Hasidism and the Haskalah in those years. We are not speaking of an insignificant bibliographical lacuna, but of a disregard for an entire field of research which would shed light not only on a forgotten chapter of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature but also on an important chapter in the relationships between Maskilim and Hasidim in that period and the genesis and development of the different streams of Hasidism. This Maskilic literature intended to do more than eradicate Hasidism; it aimed to strengthen the self-consciousness of the individual Maskilim who found themselves alone in Hasidic territory. Paradoxically, the literature documented the very movement it intended to eradicate from the world. The distorted reflection displayed in the anti-Hasidic literature does more than present a caricature of its subject -- it conceals hitherto unknown elements about the nature and development of the Hasidic movement. The present article deals with one such case, a satire on Bratslav Hasidism from 1863, which has at its core a Maskilic satirical text written by Yehiel Meller on pilgrimage to the grave of R. Nahman of Bratslav in Uman.





כתבי עת של משכילים לאורך המאה התשע עשרה הרבו לפרסם סאטירות בגנותה של החסידות. משנות הששים ואילך באה ספרות זו בעיקר כתגובה להתעוררות הדפסת ספרות השבחים החסידית ולהתפשטות החסידות במרחבים חדשים. לא קיימת עד עתה סקירה שלימה, ואף לא מיפוי כללי, של אותה ספרות פולמוסית ענפה, על אף שיש בה ללמד הרבה על דרכי החסידות וההשכלה באותן שנים.  לא מדובר רק בחסרון ביבליוגרפי שאין לו משמעות, אלא בהתעלמות משדה מחקר רב עניין שעשוי להאיר לא רק על פרק נשכח בספרות עברית ויידיש החדשה אלא גם על פרק חשוב ביחסים בין משכילים לחסידים באותה תקופה, ועל דרכי צמיחתם, פיצולם והתפתחותם של זרמים שונים בחסידות. הייתה זו ספרות שיותר מאשר נועדה לבער את החסידות נועדה לחזק את תודעתם העצמית של המשכילים הבודדים במרחבים החסידיים; ספרות שבאופן פרדוקסלי תיעדה תנועה אותה חפצו לבער מן העולם. הבבואה המעוותת בה התהדרה הסאטירה האנטי חסידית לא רק הציגה דימוי – אלא טומנת בחובה הצבעה על אלמנטים חדשים ועל התפתחויות בחסידות. במקרה אחד ממין זה הנוגע לחסידות ברסלב בשנות השישים של המאה התשע עשרה עוסק המאמר. שלפנינו - שעיקרו מהדורה של טקסט משכילי שכתב יחיאל מלר - בשנת 1863 - על העלייה לקבר ר' נחמן מברסלב באומן
"""

The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller offers a variety of strategies in which it could be studied and criticized. It is more than just a romantic novel for because of its universality and theme, it can generate multiple meanings, discourses, and opportunities for further studies among literary scholars and students. The writer of this paper will utilize properties and characteristics of romance novels basing from the studies of Jennifer Bun and Katherine Morrisey while also considering the inclusion of collective silence and fiction as guides for a more comprehensive analysis of the novel in question. Sterk's two out of nine basic plotline will also included in the analysis of the novel. Romance novels are popular among women mainly because of four reasons identified: (1) nurture/recapturing feelings of intense love; (2) entertainment/value escapism; (3) female empowerment; (4) dealing with patriarchy (Bun 2007, 9). These reasons will also be used in the analysis of the novel The Bridges of Madison County.

This introductory essay outlines some of the issues that surround contemporary engagements with the ‘‘popular’’ as a site of political struggle and change. This piece notes that in the
30 years since Stuart Hall published his seminal essay, ‘‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,’’ the power relations that define the term as well as the way in which scholars study the popular have shifted in profound ways. The authors argue that, rather than simply
equating the popular with popular culture, it is necessary to recognize that the popular is a contingent term that marks the possibility of constituting forms of collective agency and the
potential for bringing about social and political change.

[Índice y Postcriptum]
El tema del afecto y las emociones ha emergido como uno de los nuevos cuadrantes interpretativos de la literatura, la cultura y la sociedad. Este libro convoca a un selecto grupo de académicos y críticos culturales para el análisis del "giro afectivo" en América Latina. Sus ensayos ofrecen una reflexión sobre los múltiples espacios de operación del "lenguaje de las emociones", desde la narrativa, el cine y la poesía hasta la estética musical, el discurso político y las dinámicas del consumo. Se estudia así el afecto como vehículo epistémico alternativo a la racionalidad instrumental, como rasgo distintivo de la modernidad y como desafío y suplemento de la productividad capitalista. El lenguaje de las emociones ofrece una amplia reflexión teórica y crítica sobre aspectos éticos, estéticos y de representación vinculados al tema del afecto, tal como éste se manifiesta en los mitos del nacionalismo, en la construcción del género, en la vivencia de la sexualidad, en la construcción de la memoria, en la experiencia del exilio y en el invisible entramado de la esfera pública. Este volumen es una referencia obligada para situar el tema dentro de los debates de la crítica cultural contemporánea y para promover una lectura a la luz de las "identidades melancólicas" de América Latina.

The author is trying to answer the question: whether film reviews have more in common with the news journalism or with the opinion journalism? Describing the current state of research in Poland, the author points at some of the most evident signs of opinion journalism in reviews of "Ida", in Polish weekly news magazines.

الملامح التفكيكية للنقد الثقافي
نزار جبريل السعودي
انفتح النقد الثقافي على مناهج نقدية متعددة، وكان المنهج التفكيكي من بين تلك المناهج، فقد لاحظ الباحث أنه قد كان لأعلام المنهج التفكيكي ونقّاده دور بارز في التنظير للدراسات الثقافية بعامة، والنقد الثقافي بخاصة، ولذلك تهدف هذه الدراسة إلى الكشف عن الملامح التفكيكية التي اهتم بها النقد الثقافي، وقد وصل الباحث إلى عدة نتائج فيما يتصل بتلك الملامح، وهي: الانفتاح على التاريخ وانفتاح أفق القارئ، والاهتمام بالسياق، وانطلاق التأويل من فكرة الشك، والتركيز على دراسة المعنى والدلالة خاصة النسق وتعارض الدلالات، إضافة إلى بروز ملمَحَيْ التناص وقَلْبُ الهامشي ليصير مركزا.
الكلمات المفتاحية: التفكيكية، النقد الثقافي، النسق، التناص.

Deconstructive features of culture criticism.
Culture criticism was exposed to varied criticism methods; one of many types was the deconstructive criticism. The scholar noticed that there was an important role to the figures and the critics of the deconstructive methods in theorizing the cultural studies, in general, and the cultural criticism in particular. Therefore, this study aims to discover the deconstructive features which were important to cultural criticism. The researcher has reached several conclusions in relation to these features, namely: openness to the history, openness of the readers’ minds, attention to the context, launching the interpretation of the notion of doubt, focusing on the study of the meanings as well as the structure of connotation, the clash of meanings, in addition to the, appearance of the intertextuality as well as turn the margin to become the center.
Keywords: Deconstructive, Culture criticism, structure, intertextuality

The present essay is an attempt to explore Showalter’s feminist critical philosophy and the corresponding practice of such an innovative approach in literary feminism. It tries to reflect upon her critical theorization and practice, and recognize the credibility and aftereffect of both among contemporary authors, critics and readers. It investigates whether Showalter’s critical approach is a feminist social critique, i.e. an analysis of women writing in a patriarchal culture, or a development of a feminist aesthetics, i.e. an explanation of how writing by women discloses a distinctively female discourse. It looks into what makes her feminist criticism best and most importantly characterized, and her literary framework for the analysis of women’s literature..

The dissertation is a case study of a phenomenon that the author proposes to label persona-driven cultural journalism and criticism. This term points to journalism and criticism in which the performance of the journalist’s and critic’s personality becomes a foundational element in the piece. The case study focuses on three radio hosts at the Danish radio station Radio24syv but an important argument in the dissertation is the need to apply a cross-media approach to the study of journalistic personas. The dissertation offers a theoretical framework rooted in performance studies and embarks on an analysis of three cases. The analysis of wine critic and journalist Poul Pilgaard Johnsen points to a persona performance using confessions, creating an intimate space by the use of wine, and adopting a repetitive approach in topics and appearances. The persona performance is termed a confessional-sensual persona who creates journalism and criticism displaying a style of being. The analysis of gossip journalist and TV reviewer Ditte Okman demonstrates a persona performance rooted in bodily expressivity across media, the use of an outspoken and lucid attitude, and the creation of socializing spaces. The persona performances are labelled an un-ashamed persona, who creates journalism and criticism guided by affect and the performance of the authentic and sincere. Finally, the analysis of food critic and cultural journalist Martin Kongstad elucidates a performative approach to reviewing, the use of fictitious layers and a display of the persona being simultaneously present across fields. The performances are termed an overflow persona, who creates journalism and criticism that could be conceptualized as a cultural product on its own. In the concluding chapter, the findings from the analysis are discussed in relation to findings from other studies. Furthermore, it is proposed to conceptualize persona-driven approaches in a way that draw on Baumgarten’s understanding of aesthetics and the differentiation between aesthetic impressions and aesthetic experience.

This chapter investigates the practice of ayahuasca neoshamanism in Australia and ways in which forms of “cultural critique” mounted against urbanization, materialism, environmental destruction, and consumer capitalism are inscribed in narrative accounts of ecstatic healing. The practice is shown to involve a critical cultural sensibility that permeates the realms of mythology and phenomenology and the various narrative genres of trance-experience. Forms of cultural critique may be read in mythological narratives that include moral teaching on how participants should “navigate” the ayahuasca trance-experience itself. Ayahuasca practice as a form of cultural critique can be observed in how drinkers approach, experience, and articulate the basic phenomenology of their trances. The chapter demonstrates how conceptions of nature, plant-spirits, and an indigenous Other represent objects by which drinkers reflexively and critically assess various aspects of everyday ethics and the broader cultural institutions of which they are constituted.

This essay examines Lionel Trilling’s success in appealing to a variety of ad hoc publics – to a kind of “periodical imagination,” that is – while maintaining the generalist’s guise of disinterestedness, a tactic common to many public intellectuals today. It also explores how the critical essay emerged quite distinctly in the aggressive mixture of Modernism and Marxism that dominated Partisan Review’s early writings. The variety of magazines Trilling wrote for helped to forge his place as spokesman for a revamped liberal culture in America throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

صورة  الشعب بين الشاعر والرئيس دراسة  نقدية لتمثيلات الشعب في خطاب فؤاد حداد الشعري مقارنة بخطابات رؤساء مصر (ناصر- السادات-
مبارك)
من منظور النقد الثقافي تقدم الدراسة قراءة لتاريخ مصر المعاصر منذ النصف الثاني للقرن العشرين وحتى نهايات القرن العشرين