scholarly journals Abjection, Derision and Power: Writing in the Voice of the Victim in Three French Post-War Texts

2019 ◽  
pp. 174387211987934
Author(s):  
Margaret Atack

Alongside the well-known narratives of the mode rétro, which returned in the 1970s to the years of war and Occupation in France, there were texts that challenged simplistic notions of guilt and innocence through a virtuoso deployment of sarcasm and derision. Romain Gary’s La Danse de Gengis Cohn (1967), Albert Cohen’s Ô vous frères humains (1972) and Serge Gainsbourg’s album Rock Around the Bunker (1975) are all confronting the cruelty and abjection of a murderous anti-Semitism in intimate and disturbing ways. These are very different texts – a novel, an autofictional essay and an LP – but each one gives a powerful voice to the victim in these complex stories of hatred and fear. Derision enacts an aggressive dismantling of the stereotypes and tropes of the abject Other, exposing the vacuity of established pieties, the contradictions and hypocrisies at the heart of a rhetoric of superiority. Briefly situated in relation to earlier (Camus, Céline, Sartre) and later (Littell) narratives of derision relating to war and occupation centred on the perpetrator, a detailed critical and narrative analysis draws on Julia Kristeva’s analysis of abjection in order to identify what is at stake in these elaborate, stylised and unsettling texts where it is the abjected victim who is the subject of their own story.

Author(s):  
Seán Damer

This book seeks to explain how the Corporation of Glasgow, in its large-scale council house-building programme in the inter- and post-war years, came to reproduce a hierarchical Victorian class structure. The three tiers of housing scheme which it constructed – Ordinary, Intermediate, and Slum-Clearance – effectively signified First, Second and Third Class. This came about because the Corporation uncritically reproduced the offensive and patriarchal attitudes of the Victorian bourgeoisie towards the working-class. The book shows how this worked out on the ground in Glasgow, and describes the attitudes of both authoritarian housing officials, and council tenants. This is the first time the voice of Glasgow’s council tenants has been heard. The conclusion is that local council housing policy was driven by unapologetic considerations of social class.


Author(s):  
Susan Mitchell Sommers

This chapter introduces the family: father Edmund, a shoemaker turned bookseller, and his three or four wives, their social and religious status, questions of literacy and formal education. The children are introduced more or less in their birth order: Kezia, Ebenezer, Manoah, Job, and Charity. The difficulties of tracing women is discussed. Particular attention is paid to Kezia, who was the subject of one of Ebenezer’s astrological cases, and Charity, who left a decades-long trail through official records, marking her as one of the most economically savvy members of the family. Since many of the Sibly men took shorthand, there is a brief discussion of contemporary shorthand uses, accuracy, and to what extent shorthand takers preserved the voice of the speaker. Ebenezer’s daughter Urania is also introduced, though like Ebenezer and Manoah, she has her own chapter later in the work


Author(s):  
Pernilla Sundqvist

AbstractIn recent decades the preschool has leaned more towards a learning-oriented pedagogy, where the subject of technology has been given a more prominent place. Still, studies on how individual preschool staff members perceive and teach technology is scarce. This study shows how seven preschool staff in Sweden describe their work with the subject of technology and how technology education is characterized in these descriptions. The data was produced by means of semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire and analyzed with narrative analysis. The results show very diverse practices of technology education, implying the learning possibilities for children in different preschools are not equal. Some of the staff describe a clear and conscious teaching of technology, while others describe teaching what can be viewed as a limited and/or shallow technology education, where technology is sometimes used as means for learning other subjects or contents rather than being the learning objective. Six ways to characterize technology education was found, namely: technology education (1) concerns technological objects and systems in children’s environment, (2) concerns learning to handle technological objects, (3) is doing experiments, (4) involves developing abilities, (5) is naturally included in children’s play and (6) departs from digital technology.


1941 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. I. Bell
Keyword(s):  

The subject of this paper is the relations between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria, that long-protracted racial animosity which forms one of the most interesting chapters in the history of what is commonly, if loosely, known as anti-semitism; but before coming to my subject proper it will be necessary to say something about the position of the Alexandrian Jews.


Author(s):  
Naoko Saito

This article broaches what can sometimes be seen as the suppression of the female voice, sometimes the repression of the feminine. To address these matters involves the reconsideration of the political discourse that pervades education and educational research. This article is an attempt to disclose inequity in apparently equitable space, through the acknowledgment of the voice of disequilibrium. It proposes to re-place the subject of philosophy, and the subject of woman, through an alternative idea of the feminine voice in philosophy. It tries to reconfigure the female voice without negating its fated biological origin and traits, and yet avoiding the confining of thought to the constraints of gender divides. In terms of education, it shall argue for the conversation of justice as a way of cultivating the feminine voice in philosophy: as the voice of disequilibrium. This is an occasion of mutual destabilization and transformation of man and woman, crossing gender divides, and preparing an alternative route to political criticism that not only reclaims the rights of women but releases the thinking of men and women, laying the way for a better, more pluralist, and more democratic politics. The feminine voice can find a way beyond the dominance of instrumental rationality and calculative thinking in the discourse on equity itself. And it can, one might reasonably hope, have an impact on the curriculum of university education.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-211
Author(s):  
Anu Kannike ◽  
Jana Reidla

The main museums in Estonia and Latvia have lately staged new exhibitions that proceed from a contemporary museological approach and reflect the results of historical research. The article compares three cases which present alternative but complementary interpretations of the Soviet period. The authors pay special attention to the application of the biographical method prominent in contemporary cultural research, and the museological method of multivocality. They conclude that in the case of multivocality, effectively addressing different visitor groups is a great challenge to curators. There is a risk that the simplified mediation of contradictory memories and views will leave a gap for visitors with less prior knowledge about the subject of the exhibition. In large exhibition teams, the curator has a crucial role to play in negotiating with team members to prevent the concept from dispersing. In the cases studied, it is possible to observe the curators’ views and detect a similar attempt to interpret complex topics through biographies. The analysis concludes that in the context of contemporary museological approaches, the voice of the curator remains essential, especially when mediating exhibits, for they cannot speak for themselves.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2(71)) ◽  
pp. 15-17
Author(s):  
Olga V. Uvarova

The priority direction in modern conditions of musical and pedagogical activity is the training of highly qualified specialists. The main factor of successful methodological work in the field of wind instrument performance is the study of scientific achievements in physiology, pedagogy, and psychology. Currently, in the pedagogical practice of wind art, there are a number of issues that require a conceptual understanding of the physiological components of the voice and articulation apparatus, as well as the dependence of sound quality on these organs. The subject of the analysis is the correct functioning of the larynx as a resonator. The analysis of scientific and theoretical developments in the field of sound formation on wind instruments allowed us to explain a number of pedagogical approaches in the practice of musical and performing arts


Author(s):  
Antela Voulis

Petro Marko is considered by critics as one of the founders of modern Albanian prose. Scientific assessments of Petro Markos’s creativity are mainly based on long and short prose, in the form of genuine critical studies, short predictions, comments and analysis. There are papers of this nature written by scholars such as: Floresha Dado, Adriatik Kallulli, Bashkim Kuçuku, Ali Aliu, Robert Elsie and many others. The subject matter of these articles varies from simple information to moments of writer’s life, to genuine studies and analysis regarding interpretation and explanation of different elements of the structure of his literary works. In this case, we would like to highlight an article written by the author Bashkim Kuçuku, namely the novel “A name on four streets”. In this particular paper, Kucuku discusses the symbolism of the novel’s title, that even in its metaphorical form didn’t escape the punishment of dictatorship censure, closely connected with the tragic fate that followed Petro Marko. And by doing so the researcher gives us a detailed insight of the connection between his work and a broader background of Marco’s biography. In this context, together with the detailed analysis of the novel’s title, we will find the key point that paves the way for penetrating the original metaphor and symbolism of the story. According to Kuçuku, Petro Marko is a dignified, idealist, as well a stoic writer for justice and social equality. It is precisely this book, “A name in four ways”, that distinctly portrays the aforementioned author as one of the leading writers of prose in Albania and this work is one of his most distinguished among all the others. It is the aim of this study to harmonize the internal narrative analysis of the prose style with the poetic expression of all Petro Mario’s creative work.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Megan Corbin

Abstract: There exists a constant within the trajectory of Diamela Eltit’s contributions to New Chilean Fiction: the turn to the body’s revelatory capacity as a corporal archive of human existence. Simultaneously exploring and rejecting the confines of the traditional testimonial reliance on language, Eltit moves the reader to a re-consideration of the truth-telling function of the biological materiality of the body, placing imperfect corporalities on display as a means of speaking, even where the voice itself may falter.  This essay locates Eltit’s move to the corporal within the trajectory of feminist criticism, the traumatic realities of the Chilean dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods, and the search for the recuperation of those bodily knowledges represented by the disappeared.  Next, it turns to Eltit’s Impuesto a la carne as her most recent re-visioning of the importance of corporal textualities, whether or not the subject-matter of the body’s denunciation is connected to the dictatorship.  Lastly, this essay reconsiders the rejective power of the traditional archive, analyzing the effect set models have on those who seek to tell their stories outside of the traditional testimonial model. I argue that the case of Diamela Eltit is an example of the way writers and producers of cultural texts which actively inscribe alternative memories of the past are resisting the authoritative power of the archive and subversively inscribing narrative memory onto bodily materialities, re-orienting the view of the corporal from an evidentiary showing to an active process of re-telling the past. Eltit’s novels, inscribed with her corporal textual model, give voice to survivors, articulating an alternate historical model for the archive, embracing the biological and making it speak against the rigid abuses of authoritarianism.


2005 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siamak Movahedi ◽  
Aleksandra Wagner
Keyword(s):  

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