Sociability and Polite Improvement in Addison’s Periodicals

2021 ◽  
pp. 142-163
Author(s):  
Markman Ellish
Keyword(s):  
Social Reform ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Tea Consumption ◽  
The Public ◽  
Richard Steele ◽  
Significant Extension ◽  
Periodical Essays ◽  
The Spectator

Addison argued in his periodical essays that the distinctive sociability of the coffee house was especially, if not uniquely, polite, rational, and civic, and as such, an important metaphor and location for Addison’s social reform. Addison developed his conception of coffee-house sociability in dialogue with Richard Steele, but while Steele argued that emulation of virtuous behaviour in neighbourly communities was sufficient guarantor of the polite and rational reformation of public culture, Addison repeatedly toyed with a more regulated model in which an arbiter or censor moderated coffee-house behaviour. In The Spectator, Addison had identified women readers as an important commercial and ideological opportunity. While women of the polite and middling classes bore the weight of Addison’s reformist expectations, such women were excluded from the public sociability of the coffee house. In recognition of this impasse, Addison and Steele addressed a series of essays to the tea table, a form of sociability in which women and female manners were dominant. These essays develop an innovative construction of tea-table sociability located in a fluid zone between public sociability and private domesticity, centred around tea consumption, polite conversation, and reading essays from The Spectator. The tea table was, accordingly, a significant extension and revision of their theory of public sociability.

Covering in the Public Eye

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Anne McLarney
Keyword(s):  
Public Culture ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Veil

This chapter explores the life and writings of three main personalities who contributed to shaping an aesthetics of veiling in disparate but analogous ways. In their writings and their performances of a public self, these writers construct a sense of the psychic space that the outward sign of the veil helps cultivate. This psychic space, this spiritual interiority, is created by veiling but also by the words, discourses, narratives, and images of the veil in public culture and public circulation. Each writer has been profoundly invested in the politics of performance—in television (Kariman Hamza), film (Shams al-Barudi), and theater and cultural criticism (Safinaz Kazim). These three early exemplars were pivotal in formulating the ideological and conceptual contours of the genre. They set down motifs and described psychic transformations that would become classic signposts on the path to veiling. Their narratives envisioned new kinds of Islamic media in which the visual signifier of the veil would become ascendant.

Walking in the Periphery: Activist Art and Urban Resistance to Neoliberalism in Istanbul

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-333
Author(s):  
Ipek Türeli ◽  
Meltem Al
Keyword(s):  
Public Culture ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Ripple Effects ◽  
The Public ◽  
Activist Art ◽  
The Government ◽  
Ruling Party

In 2013, the Gezi Park protests created a wave of optimism in Istanbul – until it was brutally suppressed by the government. Although the ephemeral movement ended without having achieved its immediate goals, it continues to have ripple effects on the public culture of Istanbul. The ruling party, for example, has emulated the forms and formats of performance that emerged during the protests in order to mobilize its own support base. In a post-Gezi Istanbul, however, the occupation of public spaces in protest of the government has become nearly impossible, rendering alternative artistic and activist practices all the more important.

Interfaith Dialogue in Silicon Valley

2019 ◽  
pp. 272-292
Author(s):  
Annapurna Devi Pandey
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Corporate Culture ◽  
Silicon Valley ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
Public Places ◽  
The Public ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
The Usa

Silicon Valley, known as the technology hub of the USA, has emerged as a medley of places of religious worship. It has become a home to wealthy Indian Americas and to many gods and goddesses who have come to reside there as well. Indian Americans have contributed significantly to the mushrooming of temples in this region. This chapter attempts to answer the following questions: How does diaspora provide a space to reconstruct the identity of the women practitioners? How does religion enable them to negotiate their roles in the public space? In this chapter, the author argues that Hindu women in the diaspora play a very significant role in selectively performing religious rituals in public places of worship as brought from their homeland. In performing these rituals, women are creating a distinct space in mainstream public culture to reconstruct their identity and agency beyond their roles as homemakers and professionals. In this specific case study, Odia women living in Northern California are not only reshaping their traditions but are engaged in interreligious dialogue in Silicon Valley corporate culture.

Hiding a Ritual of Obedience

2020 ◽  
pp. 196-223
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Taïeb
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Symbolic Construction ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter describes executions as rituals of obedience and discusses how it was used in the symbolic construction of the relationship between rulers and citizens by attempting to force individual internalization of the state's monopoly over legitimate physical violence. The chapter talks about how the elimination of executionary publicity becomes inseparable from the practices of the modern public sphere. Under the Third Republic, many people learned to be the spectators of new sights that worked by representing a reality that was physically absent (dioramas, cinema) and in turn acquired new standards of speed. They came to find executions too slow, marred by shocking incidents, severed from reality, and likely to produce unhealthy emotions. Ultimately, these spectators began to develop a public culture accustomed to more distanced forms of political communication. The depublicization of executions was achieved when the authorities concluded that the public spectacle of death no longer had an exemplary effect and was no longer a tool that legitimized the state's monopoly over physical violence.

Macabre Simulacra

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara A. Rich
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Maritime Heritage

The maritime legacy is the human legacy; it is colonization, war, globalization, climate change, and it is coping with all these things. Yet the void between humans and their watery world remains. Attempting to fill this void, the savior-scholar model has shifted from physical to virtual resurrection. 3D digital shipwreck reconstructions have become the default mechanism for scientists to engage the public with maritime heritage, marketing VR tours with claims to ‘bring history alive’. This chapter first examines the spectator : spectacle paradigm as a byproduct of the savior-scholar model. Recounting the Bayonnaise, wrecked in 1803 off the coast of Finisterre, Spain, it then offers the lasting experience of wonder as substitute for the fleeting commodity of virtual shipwreck exploration.

Art and Space

2017 ◽  
pp. 125-137
Author(s):  
Giulia Crespi
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Public ◽  
Simple Consideration ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Yayoi Kusama

The duo “Art and Space” looks very easy to understand: art interacts with spaces, uses spaces or simply fills spaces. However, starting from this simple consideration, what this chapter would like to propose is a reflection about a kind of art that creates spaces and places instead, expanding the discussion about the interdisciplinary approach of artists to creation. Considering the works of some artist that have made the intervention on spaces one of their prerogatives, the research would like to focus on the new connections that arise between the artist and the public through these creations. The imagery of Yayoi Kusama, Tomas Saraceno, Anish Kapoor, Cristina Iglesias, Carsten Nicolai, Rudolf Stingel, among others, allows a different perception and fruition, most of time asking to the spectator itself to be an active part in the work of art.

The Temporality of the Public in The Tatler and The Spectator

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Amy Witherbee
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
The Spectator
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