3. From Everyday Life to the Crisis Ordinary : Films of Ordinary Life and the Resonance of DEFA

2021 ◽  
pp. 129-156
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Ordinary Life

scholarly journals The New Normal and Covid-19 in Serbia from February to May 2020.

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bojan Žikić ◽  
Mladen Stajić ◽  
Marko Pišev
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Critical Event ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
New Normal ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Spread Of Infection ◽  
Cultural Reality ◽  
The Given

The situation caused by the appearance of Covid-19 can be viewed as a critical event: typologically, it is an unprecedented event, which requires and shapes new forms of historical action hitherto unknown in the given context. Critical events serve as strong value and emotional landmarks in the cultural cognition of each social environment, and form the basis for a meaningful determination towards other events. Using material collected primarily from the online versions of electronic and printed media, we consider how the reality they presented is shaped through the news through the statements of politicians and medical doctors in Serbia. We trace how the narrative transformation of socio-cultural reality took place from the time before the of Covid-19 outbreak in our country to the time immediately after the lifting of the state of emergency declared due to that infection. The premise of all that is being done to tackle the infection is not a purpose in itself, but aims to enable a return to the life we were accustomed to before the outbreak of the epidemic. Covid-19 destabilizes our everyday life – a life that consists of work or study, use of free time, socializing etc. Such everyday life is a reference point of "normalcy". Socio-cultural normalcy refers to all that is understood as a normal and undisturbed course of everyday life. The appearance of Covid-19 gave rise to the notion of the "new normal", that is, a course of everyday life that is similar to normal, ordinary life, but with adherence to measures aimed at preventing the spread of infection by the authorities. In the paper we deal with the period that begins just before the outbreak of Covid-19 in our country, and ends with the period after the lifting of the state of emergency, to show the discursively produced picture of social reality in which the concept of the "new normal" serves as a cultural cognitive tool for understanding a situation in which one has to live with Covid-19 in order to one day be able to return to the way of life that existed before it.

Trauma and ordinary objects in Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett

2018 ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Yoshiki Tajiri
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Ordinary Objects ◽  
To Come ◽  
Shed Light

In this chapter, Yoshiki Tajiri focuses on the connection between trauma and everyday life: a traumatised subject needs to come to terms with everyday life and can find ordinary objects in it unexpectedly significant. By discussing such aspects of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, this chapter will illuminate the ways in which trauma and ordinary life are correlated rather than opposed. It also demonstrates that trauma theory and everyday life studies can stimulate each other: trauma is far from an everyday phenomenon, but it can shed light on the nature of everyday life after calamities of modernity as in the cases of Woolf and Beckett; conversely, there may be ways of enriching trauma studies by incorporating reflections on everyday life.

Stability and Change in Everyday Knowledge: From Taken for Granted to Social Representation

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-78
Author(s):  
Francesca Emiliani
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Social Representation ◽  
Stability And Change ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Everyday Knowledge

What do we talk about when we talk about everyday life? This chapter considers everyday life as a “metasystem” in Moscovici’s terms, a normative system that checks and organizes knowledge and thought. Looking at social representations theory, the chapter considers the structuring power of this metasystem, referring to two kinds of research where the absence (for deprived children) or suspension (in the first COVID-19 lockdown in Italy) of everyday life causes delays in children’s development and dismay in adults. The suspension of ordinary life highlights the social representation of “normality.” The structure of the “everyday life” metasystem is largely taken for granted, and this calls into question the relationship between the taken-for-granted and the knowledge that constructs social representations or, in other words, between stability and change in common knowledge.

From Everyday Life to the Crisis Ordinary : Films of Ordinary Life and the Resonance of DEFA

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hester Baer
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Eastern Germany ◽  
Affective Dimensions

This chapter examines Wolf’s Solo Sunny (1980) and Dresen’s Summer in Berlin (2005), two films that chart the transformation of ordinary life across the period of neoliberal intensification in eastern Germany. Emphasizing the transition away from—as well as the enduring influence of—DEFA and socialist realism, this chapter also attends to the affective dimensions of the neoliberal turn by focusing on women characters who figure as seismographs of political and cultural re-orientation. This chapter and the next chapter operate in tandem to analyse films that break with conventional forms of representation to signal disaffection with prevailing circumstances. I argue that this disaffection becomes retrospectively legible in the earlier films through the pointed critique of neoliberalism developed by their later intertexts.

A Politics of the Ordinary. By Thomas L. Dumm. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 240p. $55.00 cloth, $18.50 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-176
Author(s):  
Fred M. Frohock
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
New York University ◽  
Main Claim ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Reciprocal Influences ◽  
Two Bodies

Exploring the ordinary is a reasonable and fun way to get through the day. Thomas Dumm takes the exploration along a cart path toward democratic politics, dramatizing the intersections and reciprocal influences of everyday life and political events and the forces of conformity and normalcy that shackle the ordinary. The working technique is juxtaposition, the kind of display that one finds in the store windows of, well, ordinary life in towns and cities. The pantheon of familiar figures and texts includes Emerson, Thoreau, Nixon, Disney, alien depictions, Lowi, Wolin, Cavell, the King's Two Bodies, Baudrillard, and many more, all offered as showcase for the book's main claim that the ordinary is the primary source of the democratic imagination.

scholarly journals ‘In the Meantime’: Ordinary Life in Continuous Medical Testing for Lung Cancer

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Michal Frumer ◽  
Rikke Sand Andersen ◽  
Peter Vedsted ◽  
Sara Marie Hebsgaard Offersen
Keyword(s):  
Lung Cancer ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cancer Control ◽  
Diagnostic Uncertainty ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Medical Testing ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
Subject Making ◽  
Diagnostic Investigations

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Danes undergoing CT scans as part of follow-up testing for potential lung cancer, we explore how access to technologies generates diagnostic uncertainty and trends of continuous testing. Our research is set in the context of a welfare state that has cultivated forms of government whose public health branches focus on early diagnosis and cancer control. Many studies on biotechnologies emphasise subject-making and power relations. Inspired by the work of Veena Das, we adopt an approach that focuses on the entanglement of diagnostic investigations with everyday life. We argue that being followed establishes a mode of being which we call ‘in the meantime’. Life in the meantime is equally characterised by a dramatic mode of being—that is, waiting for death—and an ambiguous mode of being: feeling quite well. As with any life crisis, it involves some sense of agency. We show in this paper how life in the meantime informs an ordinary ethics that encourages three ethical concerns in everyday life: firstly, how to inhabit life in the meantime? Secondly, what good is the testing for? And finally, what is a good death?

‘To love and to be loved’: Janina Bauman’s ordinary life

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 107 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-105
Author(s):  
Peter Beilharz ◽  
Sian Supski
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Autobiographical Texts

Janina Bauman was a sociologist of everyday life. Her autobiographical texts, Winter in the Morning (1986), A Dream of Belonging (1988), and the synthetic volume Beyond These Walls (2006), manage a kind of personal poignancy combined with world-historic content and attention to the detail of everyday life that sets her work apart. This essay responds to these attributes and offers a contribution to her remembrance as a writer, an actor in and observer of everyday life in Warsaw and Leeds across the 20th century.

III. Chaucer's “Troilus and Criseyde” as Romance

PMLA ◽  
1938 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Young
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Troilus And Criseyde ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
Psychological Novel

In the critical writing of the last few decades Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde has been described prevailingly as a psychological novel. Our most influentual interpreters, that is to say, draw our attention primarily to the subtle exhibition of psychology in the personages of the poem, and to the resemblance of the descriptive background to what we ordinarily call real life. By emphasizing these aspects of the Troilus they bring it into association with our modern novel. Representative of this view are such expressions as the following:“Our first great psychological novel”; “A great psychological novel”; “An elaborate psychological novel”; “The first novel, in the modern sense”; “Its spirit and temper is that of the modern novel”; “A page out of the book of modern everyday life”;6 “[Chaucer's] first and greatest adventure into the world of every day”; “[What Chaucer adds to the Filostralo] is what we roughly call reality…. one has a sense of ordinary life going on”; “Troy is mediaeval London”; “[The Troilus] is not a romance”; “[In the Troilus Chaucer] leaves all romantic convention behind.”

Ordinary Atmospheres and Minor Weather Events

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 79-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Gannon
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Weather Events ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Relational Qualities

This essay is inspired by Kathleen Stewart's call to pay attention to the affective, material, and relational qualities of everyday life, and by the posthuman imperative that we recognize how we are imbricated with all creatures, objects, and forces in our worlds. It assembles little scenes of weather in everyday life, aiming for an atmospheric attunement to the elemental and domestic, and exploring these through some of the work of critical geographers on affect and atmosphere. As I meander through moments and events of weather in the everyday, I keep close to home, literally, in these scenes of ordinary life.

scholarly journals History of the Family and Native Place in the Projection of the Life Path of a Professional Folklorist and Ethnographer

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 155-169
Author(s):  
Irina A. Razumova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
The North ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
History Of ◽  
Life Path ◽  
Native Place

The purpose of the article is to determine the value of works like the book Pomni korni svoi (“Remember your roots”) by the Karelian folklorist A.S. Stepanova about the history of her native village for humanitarian research and for the dissemination of historical and ethnographic knowledge. Stepanova’s book is examined in the context of problems concerning the possibilities and ways of reconciling academic and personal everyday knowledge in the situation when a humanities scholar is acting as a first-hand historian or as an ordinary life writer. While Stepanova’s scholarly works on Karelian lamentations are internationally known, the book in question was published both in Russian and Karelian and is addressed to her direct descendants. It is about the North Karelian village of Shombozero, which no longer exists. Most of its inhabitants were related by kinship. The narrative is based on the author's memoirs and autobiography. The book includes the results of genealogical reconstruction, documentary information about the history of the settlement, oral history materials, and the demographic history of households in the late 19th — first half of the 20th centuries. It describes the topography of the area, ways of communication and means of transportation, the traditional household, and economic and everyday life of the Karelians in the 1930s–1950s. The history of the place and the everyday life of its inhabitants are presented in the projection of the formation and life path of a professional philologist and teacher. The author of the book describes and reflects on the activities of rural “national” boarding schools in the 1930s–1940s, teachers and students, life stories of various immigrants from local peasant families, the daily life of university students in the 1950s, twists and turns in the life of her family, the process of becoming a scholar, and episodes from the history of the study of Karelian folklore. As a result, the book notably exceeds its objective to preserve family memory. It is a valuable source for the study of ethnography, ethno-social and ethno-linguistic processes, the circulation of folklore, social history of families and other areas of humanitarian and social studies. It conveys both local and general historical knowledge and can be used by specialists as a professional description of the life of the settler and family-related communities during changes due to chrisis.

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