VICTORIAN STUDIES AND CULTURAL STUDIES: INTERDISCIPLINARITY, THE MARKET, AND A CALL FOR CRITICAL REALISM

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 481-486
Author(s):  
Linda Shires

VICTORIAN STUDIES PRACTITIONERS have often applauded themselves on their openness to views, topics, and approaches not immediately recognizable as already part of the field. I put the formulation this way because Victorian studies scholars and critics also prize the field for its capaciousness; they tend to think of the field as large and already all-inclusive. It houses many genres and sub-disciplines and it first welcomed certain kinds of critical theory when other historical fields moved more slowly to accept them.

Author(s):  
Juliet John

This Introduction explores the vexed term ‘Victorian literary culture’ by revisiting the origins of today’s disciplinary map in the Victorian period. It explains current uneasiness with the idea of ‘the literary’ by retracing its associations with the humanist writings of Arnold and Leavis and the subsequent reaction against humanism which propelled cultural studies, critical theory, and contemporary interdisciplinarity. It argues for the reintegration and re-evaluation of the ideas of ‘the literary’ and ‘literary culture’ into prevailing interdisciplinary practice and defences of the arts and humanities. This should not signal a return to a naïve humanism, apoliticism, or ahistoricism but can emerge from the ‘hermeneutics of integrity’ that John sees as prevalent in today’s Victorian studies. As literary culture has provided Victorian studies with much of its base as well as its baggage, it is important to allow the prodigal idea of the literary to rebalance our academic and public conversations.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Szczepanik

Refugee or "Newcomer". Dispute over the Word: About the Artistic Project "Nowacy" ("Newcomers") by Jana Shostak in the Context of the Construction of Meaning and the Migration CrisisThe artistic diploma project of Jana Shostak, a Polish student from Belarus, assumed the introduction of the word “nowak” (newcomer) into the Polish language as an alternative to the negative term “refugee.” This initiative becomes particularly important in the context of the migration crisis, going beyond the safe sphere of art. The methods of presenting it, both by the artist and by the media, in the form of interviews, press articles and comments on internet forums, were analyzed. The article is an attempt to make a meta-interpretation of this artistic proposal from the perspective of critical cultural studies, emphasizing two main areas: culture as a battlefield and language as a tool of constructing meaning. Methodologically, it is also supported by relativistic linguistic theories, the paradigm of symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, the concept of engaged aesthetics and critical theory. Uchodźca, czyli „nowak”. Spór o słowo. O projekcie artystycznym  „Nowacy” Jany Shostak w kotekście konstruowania znaczeń i kryzysu migracyjnegoArtystyczny projekt dyplomowy Jany Shostak zakłada wprowadzenie do języka polskiego słowa „nowak” jako alternatywy dla negatywnie nacechowanego określenia „uchodźca”. Inicjatywa ta nabiera szczególnego znaczenia w kontekście kryzysu migracyjnego, wykraczając poza bezpieczną sferę sztuki. Analizie poddane zostały sposoby jej prezentowania zarówno przez artystkę, jak i przez media, w postaci wywiadów, artykułów prasowych oraz wypowiedzi na forach internetowych. Artykuł jest próbą dokonania meta-interpretacji tej propozycji artystycznej z perspektywy kulturoznawstwa krytycznego z postawieniem akcentu na dwa zasadnicze obszary: kultury jako pola walki oraz języka jako narzędzia konstruującego znaczenie. Metodologicznie wspiera się również relatywistycznymi teoriami lingwistycznymi, paradygmatem interakcjonizmu symbolicznego, etnometodologią, oraz koncepcją estetyki zaangażowanej i teorią krytyczną.


Author(s):  
Anastasia Marinopoulou

Critical Theory and Epistemology is a comparison of the major epistemological concerns in the twentieth century with critical theory of the Frankfurt School. I focus on modern epistemology as a theory of and about science that also addresses the social and political aims of scientific enquiry.The critique that the book deploys on the epistemological tendencies of late modernity suggests that the main distinction between Kant and the critical theorists lies in their understanding of rationality. Such a critique can be characterized as the ‘battle’ of modern epistemology for or against the scientifically, socially and politically rational. Thus, arguments of modern epistemology, as articulated by phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism, modernists and postmodernists, systems’ theory and critical realism, can certainly be considered ‘modern’ in historical terms, but in essence their concerns are of a pre-modern and pre-scientific nature. In such a manner, we come closer to understanding what constitutes the scientific, philosophy, truth, and whether modern epistemology paves the way for a political epistemology in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Philip J. Dobson

The chapter revisits the System of System Methodologies (SoSM) and suggests that use of the SoSM as a framework for defining methodological assumptions is difficult when the concerned methodologies have significantly different meanings for one axis of the framework—“system” complexity. It is suggested that the purpose of the underlying system can provide a more appropriate frame for defining system approaches—such purpose being defined as interaction or transformation (Mathiassen & Nielsen, 2000). The chapter also uses aspects of critical realism to provide insights into the SoSM and the critical theory underpinning the framework. The SoSM helped to highlight the neglect of coercive situations and ultimately helped prompt the development of critical systems theory which is focused on three basic commitments, critical awareness, methodological pluralism, and emancipation. Maru and Woodford (2001) recently argue that the focus on emancipation has been relegated due to a concentration on pluralism. This chapter suggests that this is a logical outcome of the epistemological focus of the underlying critical theory of Habermas. The Habermas focus on the epistemological or knowledge-based aspects of the development process must necessarily relegate the importance of ontological matters such as the conditions necessary for emancipatory practice. This chapter proposes that the philosophy of critical realism has insights to offer through its highlighting of the ontological issues in more detail and in arguing for a recognition of the deep structures and mechanisms involved in social situations.


1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 212-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Birrell

This paper suggests that sport sociology may be ready to move from a generally atheoretical approach to “race and sport“ to a critical analysis of racial relations and sport. Four theoretical groups are identified from the writing of racial relations scholars: bias and discrimination theories, assimilation and cultural deprivation theories, materialist and class-based theories, and culturalist or colonial theories. In the past, studies of race and sport have fit within the former two theories. A cultural studies approach that blends the latter theories is advocated in order to move toward the goal of critical theory and develop a comprehensive model for analyzing the complex of relations of dominance and subordination simultaneously structured along racial, gender, and class lines.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Delanty

The notion of critique, as in the idea of a critical theory of society, is in urgent need of clarification both theoretically and methodologically. At least five major uses of the term can be found within sociological theory, the positions associated with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School from Adorno to Habermas and Honneth, Bourdieu's critical sociology, critical realism, Foucault's genealogical critique, and various notions of critical practice, most notably the work of Boltanski and Thévenot. It is possible to detect a movement from the Hegelian-Marxist approach towards interpretative conceptions of critique, leading to a pluralisation of critique and a shift from macro to micro analysis. A theoretical clarification of the notion of critique in these approaches offers a basis for a new and more rigorous methodological application of critique in social research.


1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 473-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Glover

ALTHOUGH IT IS NOW COMMONPLACE to find cultural studies invoked as one of the tributaries of Victorian studies — and the rubric for this journal is no exception — the precise relationship between these two interdiciplinary fields is still unsettled and seems likely to remain so. This is not, as is sometimes claimed, because cultural studies has felt able to dispense with the past, preferring to dwell in and upon the postmodernized present: to the contrary, some of the finest work currently linked to cultural studies has shown a keen awareness of the bankruptcy of contemporary posthistoire, insisting instead upon the continuing need to interrogate the historical record, to reexamine what was at stake both in the longues durées of culturally sedimented time and in the flashpoints and crises of yesteryear. Catherine Hall’s engagement with the changing configuration of “race” in the debates about the British empire between 1830 and 1870 has been exemplary in this regard, but she is far from being the only relevant exception that one might cite — Carolyn Steedman and Richard Johnson are among the many other names that immediately come to mind.


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