Generative Semantics 3: The Ethos

2021 ◽  
pp. 201-222
Author(s):  
Randy Allen Harris
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
Direct Service ◽  
Intellectual Style ◽  
Cultural Movement ◽  
Broad Generalization

This chapter describes the distinctive ethos of Generative Semantics, which permeated the field from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, exactly when the counterculture (“the hippies”) were flourishing as a broad cultural movement. While there were many personal motivations in the development of this ethos, a broad generalization holds that just as the counterculture was rooted in rejecting establishment values, the Generative Semantics ethos was rooted in a rejection of perceived Chomskyan values. Their intellectual style embraced humor (Chomsky epitomizes seriousness), political engagement (Chomsky was a forceful activist but segregated his political and linguistic work sharply), and a veneration of data for the sake of data (Chomsky’s data was always highly constrained, in direct service to his theoretical claims; Generative Semanticists eagerly pursued data even when it undermined their theories).

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

‘Staring into All Their Yellow Eyes’: Where the Wild Things Are, the 1960s, and the Vietnam War

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-73
Author(s):  
Michelle Ann Abate ◽  
Sarah Bradford Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Psychological Perspective ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Military Involvement ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Alternative Reading

Since its release in 1963, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are has been viewed from a psychological perspective as a literary representation of children's inner emotional struggles. This essay challenges that common critical assessment. We make a case that Sendak's classic picturebook was also influenced by the turbulent era of the 1960s in general and the nation's rapidly escalating military involvement in Vietnam in particular. Our alternative reading of Sendak's text reveals a variety of both visual and verbal elements that recall the conflict in South East Asia and considers the significance of the book's geo-political engagement.

Faeries, Aliens, and Leviathans: Science and Fantasy in Ian McDonald's King of Morning, Queen of Day

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-303
Author(s):  
Richard Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Unexplored Area ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Movement

Irish science fiction is a relatively unexplored area for Irish Studies, a situation partially rectified by the publication of Jack Fennell's Irish Science Fiction in 2014. This article aims to continue the conversation begun by Fennell's intervention by analysing the work of Belfast science fiction author Ian McDonald, in particular King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), the first novel in what McDonald calls his Irish trilogy. The article explores how McDonald's text interrogates the intersection between science, politics, and religion, as well as the cultural movement that was informing a growing sense of a continuous Irish national identity. It draws from the discipline of Science Studies, in particular the work of Nicholas Whyte, who writes of the ways in which science and colonialism interacted in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.

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