scholarly journals Literature and Economics. Another Way to Read the Text

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (33) ◽  
pp. 31-40
Author(s):  
Ingrida Kisieliūtė

At the end of the 20th century, the study of literature was supplemented by such new methods as biopoetics, geopoetics, new historicism, etc. The New Economic Criticism, a new approach to the literary text, was found in the United States in the late 20th century. The present article discusses the main aspects of the aforementioned area of the study of literature and as well presents the possible approaches to literary texts from the economic perspective. The New Economic Criticism does not aim to become a method or tendency; thus, it givesthe freedom for a researcher to choose the perspective on the relationship between the literature and economics. The above-mentioned kind of analysis may be found in the English-speaking countries; whereas, the Russian literature has still remained unconsidered; however, Russian scholars are attempting to look at their fiction through the eyes of an economist. In Lithuania, the kind of research has not been found yet. Therefore, the article suggests one of the possible economic approaches, i.e., the analysis of the financial practices of the protagonist of The Gambler by F. Dostoyevsky. 

Author(s):  
Robert T. Tally, Jr.

Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) was the leading Marxist literary and cultural critic in the United States and, arguably, in the English-speaking world in the late 20th century and remains so in the early 21st. In a career that spans more than 60 years, Jameson has produced some 25 books and hundreds of essays in which he has demonstrated the versatility and power of Marxist criticism in analyzing and evaluating an enormous range of cultural phenomena, from literary texts to architecture, art history, cinema, economic formations, psychology, social theory, urban studies, and utopianism, to mention but a few. In his early work, Jameson introduced a number of important 20th-century European Marxist theorists to American audiences, beginning with his study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s style and continuing with his Marxism and Form (1971) and The Prison-House of Language (1972), which offered critical analyses of such theorists as Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, along with the Frankfurt School, Russian formalism, and French structuralism. With The Political Unconscious (1981) and other works, Jameson deftly articulated such topics as the linguistic turn in literature and philosophy, the concepts of desire and national allegory, and the problems of interpretation and transcoding in a decade when continental theory was beginning to transform literary studies in the English-speaking world. Jameson then became the leading theorist and critic of postmodernism, and his Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) demonstrated the power of Marxist theoretical practice to make sense of the system underlying the discrete and seemingly unrelated phenomena in the arts, architecture, media, economics, and so on. Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping has been especially influential on cultural theories of postmodernity and globalization. Jameson’s lifelong commitment to utopian thought and dialectical criticism have found more systematic expression in such books as Archaeologies of the Future (2005) and Valences of the Dialectic (2009), and he has continued to develop a major, six-volume project titled “The Poetics of Social Forms” (the final two volumes of which remain forthcoming as of 2018), whose trajectory ultimately covers myth, allegory, romance, realism, modernism, postmodernism, and beyond. Jameson’s expansive, eclectic, and ultimately holistic approach to cultural critique demonstrates the power of Marxist critical theory both to interpret, and to help change, the world.


Author(s):  
Anna Igorevna Filimonova

After the collapse of the USSR, fundamentally new phenomena appeared on the world arena, which became a watershed separating the bipolar order from the monopolar order associated with the establishment of the US global hegemony. Such phenomena were the events that are most often called «revolutions» in connection with the scale of the changes being made — «velvet revolutions» in the former Eastern Bloc, as well as revolutions of a different type, which ended in a change in the current regimes with such serious consequences that we are also talking about revolutionary transformations. These are technologies of «color revolutions» that allow organizing artificial and seemingly spontaneous mass protests leading to the removal of the legitimate government operating in the country and, in fact, to the seizure of power by a pro-American forces that ensure the Westernization of the country and the implementation of "neoliberal modernization", which essentially means the opening of national markets and the provision of natural resources for the undivided use of the Western factor (TNC and TNB). «Color revolutions» are inseparable from the strategic documents of the United States, in which, from the end of the 20th century, even before the collapse of the USSR, two main tendencies were clearly traced: the expansion of the right to unilateral use of force up to a preemptive strike, which is inextricably linked with the ideological justification of «missionary» American foreign policy, and the right to «assess» the internal state of affairs in countries and change it to a «democratic format», that is, «democratization». «Color revolutions», although they are not directly mentioned in strategic documents, but, being a «technical package of actions», straightforwardly follow from the right, assigned to itself by Washington, to unilateral use of force, which is gradually expanding from exclusively military actions to a comprehensive impact on an opponent country, i.e. essentially a hybrid war. Thus, the «color revolutions» clearly fit into the strategic concept of Washington on the use of force across the entire spectrum (conventional and unconventional war) under the pretext of «democratization». The article examines the period of registration and expansion of the US right to use force (which, according to the current international law, is a crime without a statute of limitations) in the time interval from the end of the twentieth century until 2014, filling semantic content about the need for «democratic transformations» of other states, with which the United States approached the key point of the events of the «Arab spring» and «color revolutions» in the post-Soviet space, the last and most ambitious of which was the «Euromaidan» in Ukraine in 2014. The article presents the material for the preparation of lectures and seminars in the framework of the training fields «International Relations» and «Political Science».


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  

American urban history embraces all historiography related to towns, cities, and metropolitan regions in the United States. American urban history includes the examination of places, processes, and ways of life through a broad and diverse range of themes including immigration, migration, population distribution, economic and spatial development, politics, planning, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Urban history emerged as an identifiable subfield of United States history in the mid-20th century, admittedly well after the establishment of similar areas of inquiry in other professional fields and academic disciplines, particularly sociology. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, a small number of academics, led by noted social historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., commenced the first wave of scholarly interest in American urban history with works on colonial seaports and select 19th-century cities. By the 1950s, urban history coalesced as a recognizable subfield around a reformulation of American history, emphasizing the establishment of towns, rather than the pursuit of agriculture, as the spearhead for the formation and growth of the nation. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a second round of interest in American urban history, set against the backdrop of the tremendous political and social changes that swept the nation and transformed the historical profession. Through innovative models of scholarship that broke with traditional consensus history, notably pioneering quantitative research methods, a self-identified “new urban history” emerged that emphasized spatial development as well as social, economic, and political mobility, conflict, and change. Over time, this new urban history was largely subsumed within social history, given the fields’ intersecting and overlapping interests in social and political issues viewed through the lenses of race, class, and gender. Social history’s broad focus resulted in an explosion of scholarship that all but dominated the American historical profession by the late 20th century. From the mid-1970s through the 1990s, books with urban settings and themes, most of them well within the camp of social history, won an impressive number of Bancroft prizes and other prestigious awards. Urban history itself has survived—even thrived—without a widely agreed upon canon or dominant research methodology. Scholars continue to make significant contributions to urban history, whether or not they embrace the title of urbanist. Note that attendance at the biannual meetings of the Urban History Association has grown significantly over the last two decades. The sources in this article’s twenty subject headings have been arranged to illustrate the depth and breadth of each prominent theme in the field and are by no means an exhaustive list of such scholarship, but rather a sampling of the most influential and innovative examinations of America’s urban canvas.


Virittäjä ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 122 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lotta Aarikka

Artikkelissa tarkastellaan suomalaisen murteentutkimuksen historiaa suomen kielen alalla ilmestyneiden murteita käsittelevien väitöskirjojen lähdeluetteloiden avulla. Artikkelissa käsitellään dialektologian ja sosiolingvistiikan suhdetta sekä perustellaan sitä, miksi alueellisen vaihtelun tutkimushistoriaa on tarpeen tarkastella kokonaisuutena. Aineistona on 41 väitöskirjan lähdeluetteloista koostettu lähdetietokanta, jota analysoidaan tekijä-, nimike- ja julkaisuvuositietojen näkökulmasta.  Lähdetietokannan viitatuin sadasosa tekijöistä kattaa 27 tutkijaa, joihin on viitattu lähdetietokannassa 40–316 kertaa. Yhteensä tähän tekijäjoukkoon viitataan lähdetietokanta-aineistossa 2 672 kertaa. Yli 10 kertaa lähdeluetteloissa mainittuja tekijöitä on 150. Miesten tekemään tutkimukseen viitataan useammin kuin naisten ja kotimaisten tutkijoiden tekemään tutkimukseen useammin kuin ei-kotimaisten. Murteita käsittelevissä väitöskirjoissa ei viitata juuri lainkaan tutkimukseen, joka olisi kotimaisten ja ei-kotimaisten tutkijoiden yhteistyössä tekemää. Sekä tekijöiden sukupuolen että kotimaisuuden näkökulmasta on havaittavissa paitsi laaja väitöskirjakohtainen vaihtelu myös tendenssi kohti kansainvälistymistä ja naisten tasavertaisempaa edustusta tutkimusalalla. Aineiston kumulatiivinen luonne aiheuttaa vanhojen nimikkeiden painottumisen. Tämä näkyy esimerkiksi siitä, että uusimmat pelkän frekvenssin perusteella viitatuimmiksi määritetyt teokset ovat ilmestyneet vuonna 1966. Tätä vinoutumista voi tasapainottaa tarkastelemalla viitattujen nimikkeiden julkaisuvuoteen suhteutettua suhdelukua. Myös siten, että tarkasteluun ottaa nimikkeet, joihin on viitattu neljäsosassa väitöskirjoja (88 kpl), on joukko vähemmän homogeeninen. Julkaisuvuosien ja nimikkeiden jakautumista verrattaessa voi perustellusti todeta, että 1900-luvun loppupuoliskolla ilmestyneisiin nimikkeisiin viittaaminen on heterogeenisempää kuin vuosisadan alkupuoliskolla ilmestyneisiin. Tätä selittävät paitsi tutkimuksen monimuotoistuminen myös sen määrän kasvu. Lähdeluetteloiden tarkasteleminen tuo uuden näkökulman tutkimushistorian analysointiin. Se todentaa empiirisesti, keihin ja mihin tutkimuksiin tieteenalalla viitataan. Kvantitatiivisen luonteensa vuoksi näkökulma tarjoaa myös paljon lisäkysymyksiä laadulliselle jatkotutkimukselle.   Dialect study in the light of citations This article considers research history on dialects in Finland. It examines the relationship of dialectology and sociolinguistics in the study of dialects and explains why they must be understood as one continuous research history. The data used in this article comes from a citation database compiled from the bibliographies of 41 doctoral theses. In the citation database, 27 researchers comprise the most cited 1%; they have been cited between 40 and 316 times. The most cited 1% has been cited in the database a total of 2,672 times, while 150 individual researchers have been cited over 10 times. Men are cited more often than women, and Finnish researchers have been cited more frequently than non-Finnish ones. There are almost no citations to research that has been conducted jointly by a Finnish and non-Finnish researcher. The variation in citing women and non-Finnish researchers is great, and there is a tendency towards more international and equal citing. The cumulative nature of the data means that older research is over-represented. This can be deduced from the fact that the newest frequently cited research dates from 1966. This distortion can be balanced by creating and analysing a ratio based on the year in which individual works were published. Also, when looking at the research that has been cited in a quarter of all dissertations (88), the data becomes less homogenous. When analysing the amount of research published, it is justified to say that citing in the late 20th century is more heterogeneous than it was at the beginning of the century. The diversification and increased volume of research explains this change.  The article demonstrates how a quantitative perspective, based on citations, can enhance our understanding of research history. It verifies with empirical data whom and which research has been cited over the years. Finally, the article concludes what kinds of questions concerning research history arise and can still be answered by further investigating the citation database.  


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Pulvers ◽  
A. Paula Cupertino ◽  
Taneisha S. Scheuermann ◽  
Lisa Sanderson Cox ◽  
Yen-Yi Ho ◽  
...  

<p><strong>Background: </strong>Higher smoking prevalence and quantity (cigarettes per day) has been linked to acculturation in the United States among Latinas, but not Latino men. Our study examines variation between a dif­ferent and increasingly important target behavior, smoking level (nondaily vs daily) and acculturation by sex.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>An online English-language sur­vey was administered to 786 Latino smokers during July through August 2012. The Brief Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans–II (ARSMA-II) and other accul­turation markers were used. Multinomial lo­gistic regression models were implemented to assess the association between smoking levels (nondaily, light daily, and moderate/ heavy daily) with acculturation markers.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Greater ARMSA-II scores (rela­tive risk ratio, <em>RRR</em>=.81, 95% CI: .72-.91) and being born inside the United States (<em>RRR</em>=.42, 95% CI: .24-.74) were associated with lower relative risk of nondaily smoking. Greater Latino orientation (<em>RRR</em>=1.29, 95% CI: 1.11-1.48) and preference for Spanish language (<em>RRR</em>=1.06, 95% CI: 1.02-1.10) and media (<em>RRR</em>=1.12, 95% CI: 1.05-1.20) were associated with higher relative risk of nondaily smoking. The relationship between acculturation and smoking level did not differ by sex.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>This study found that among both male and female, English-speaking Latino smokers, nondaily smoking was associated with lower acculturation, while daily smoking was linked with higher ac­culturation.</p><p><em>Ethn Dis. </em>2018.28(2):105-114; doi:10.18865/ed.28.2.105.</p>


Author(s):  
Ronald Williams Jr.

On January 17, 1893, Her Majesty Queen Liliʻuokalani, sovereign of the Hawaiian Kingdom, was overthrown in a coup de main led by a faction of business leaders comprised largely of descendants of the 1820 American Protestant mission to the “Sandwich Islands.” Rev. Charles Hyde, an officer of the ecclesiastic Papa Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian Board) declared, “Hawaii is the first Country in which the American missionaries have labored, whose political relations to the United States have been changed as a result of missionary labors.” The actions of these “Sons of the Mission” were enabled by U.S. naval forces landed from the USS Boston the evening prior. Despite blatant and significant connections between early Christian missionaries to Hawaiʻi and their entrepreneurial progeny, the 1893 usurpation of native rule was not the result of a teleological seventy-year presence in the Hawaiian Kingdom by the American Protestant Church. An 1863 transfer of authority over the Hawaiian mission from the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to the local ʻAhahui ʻEuanelio o Hawaiʻi (AEH) (Hawaiian Evangelical Association) served as a pivotal inflection point that decidedly altered the original mission, driving a political and economic agenda masked only by the professed goals of the ecclesiastic institution. Christianity, conveyed to the Hawaiian Islands initially by representatives of the ABCFM, became a contested tool of religio-political significance amidst competing foreign and native claims on leadership in both church and state. In the immediate aftermath of the January 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom government, this introduced religion became a central tool of the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) struggle for a return of their queen and the continued independence of their nation. Native Christian patriots organized and conducted a broad array of political actions from within the churches of the AEH using claims on Ke Akua (God) and Christianity as a foundation for their vision of continued native rule. These efforts were instrumental in the defeat of two proposed treaties of annexation of their country—1893 and 1897—before the United States, declaring control of the archipelago a strategic necessity in fighting the Spanish/Filipino–American War, took possession of Hawaiʻi in late 1898. Widespread Americanization efforts in the islands during the early 20th century filtered into Hawaiʻi’s Christian churches, transforming many of these previous focal points of relative radicalism into conservative defenders of the American way. A late-20th-century resurgence of cultural and political activism among Kanaka Maoli, fostered by a “Hawaiian Renaissance” begun in the 1970s, has driven a public and academic reexamination of the past and present role of Christianity in this current-day American outpost in the center of the Pacific.


Author(s):  
B. Alex Beasley

American cities have been transnational in nature since the first urban spaces emerged during the colonial period. Yet the specific shape of the relationship between American cities and the rest of the world has changed dramatically in the intervening years. In the mid-20th century, the increasing integration of the global economy within the American economy began to reshape US cities. In the Northeast and Midwest, the once robust manufacturing centers and factories that had sustained their residents—and their tax bases—left, first for the South and West, and then for cities and towns outside the United States, as capital grew more mobile and businesses sought lower wages and tax incentives elsewhere. That same global capital, combined with federal subsidies, created boomtowns in the once-rural South and West. Nationwide, city boosters began to pursue alternatives to heavy industry, once understood to be the undisputed guarantor of a healthy urban economy. Increasingly, US cities organized themselves around the service economy, both in high-end, white-collar sectors like finance, consulting, and education, and in low-end pink-collar and no-collar sectors like food service, hospitality, and health care. A new legal infrastructure related to immigration made US cities more racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse than ever before. At the same time, some US cities were agents of economic globalization themselves. Dubbed “global cities” by celebrants and critics of the new economy alike, these cities achieved power and prestige in the late 20th century not only because they had survived the ruptures of globalization but because they helped to determine its shape. By the end of the 20th century, cities that are not routinely listed among the “global city” elite jockeyed to claim “world-class” status, investing in high-end art, entertainment, technology, education, and health care amenities to attract and retain the high-income white-collar workers understood to be the last hope for cities hollowed out by deindustrialization and global competition. Today, the extreme differences between “global cities” and the rest of US cities, and the extreme socioeconomic stratification seen in cities of all stripes, is a key concern of urbanists.


Author(s):  
Diana Wylie

The Tangier American Legation Museum reflects the evolution of Moroccan–American relations over two centuries. Morocco, the first country to recognize the independence of the United States (1777), became the site of the first overseas American diplomatic mission in 1821 when the sultan gave the US government title to the museum’s current home—8 rue d’Amérique (zankat America)—in the old city of Tangier. The building went on to house the US consulate (1821–1905), legation (1905–1956), a State Department Foreign Service language school (1961–1970), and a Peace Corps training center (1970–1973), before becoming a museum dedicated to displaying art and artifacts about Morocco and Moroccan–American relations (1976). Despite the official story of the origin of the forty-one-room museum, its holdings and activities since the late 20th century derive more from unofficial American relationships with Morocco than from US government policy. The private actions of individual Americans and Moroccans, with some State Department support, led the museum to become in the late 20th century a research and cultural center serving academics and the broad public, including the people in its neighborhood (Beni Ider). In 1981 the US Department of the Interior put the Legation on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 1982 it became the only site outside the United States designated as a National Historic Landmark due to its past diplomatic and military significance, as well as to the building’s blend of Moroccan and Spanish architectural styles.


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-582
Author(s):  
Dawn Chatty

Academic interest in the study of forced migration as a specific field developed only in the late 20th century. But its conceptual tools had a much earlier incarnation in the United States. In the early 20th century historical linguistic and ethnographic research was being conducted with Native American peoples who had been subjected to massive ethnic cleansings in the preceding two centuries. Much of that early work was with tribes who had been displaced, dispossessed, and involuntarily marched into resource-poor reservations. The scientists working with them thought they were engaging in a kind of salvage operation to record ways of life before they disappeared. These researchers largely ignored or failed to recognize the impacts of displacement—destroyed settlements, land occupation, nonviable reservations, inadequate welfare, and hostile administrations and lack of legal rights—and focused instead on trying to reconstruct memory culture of “what life was like in the old days.” Nevertheless, these studies gave us many of our basic concepts to describe and analyze the experience of uprootedness and dispossession. These fundamental concepts have become important in the discipline of forced migration studies. They include understandings of: role and identity, hierarchy, social networks, conflict mechanisms, reciprocity and trust, boundary creation, rites of passage, liminality, and the role of myths.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 186-208
Author(s):  
Hing Tsang

This article argues that the work of the late Johan van der Keuken offers a contribution to ecological semiotics, and that it also defines the relationship between the semiotic animal and nature in ways that avoid glottocentricism. Taking from the recent work of Kalevi Kull, Jesper Hoffmeyer, and John Deely amongst others, I will argue that van der Keuken’s documentaries offer a view of ecology that is broader than a study of bio-physical processes that might reduce ecology to a narrow political issue.In order to support this argument, I will be looking at two contrasting films from van der Keuken – Flat Jungle (1978) and Face Value (1991). The first film examines natural habitats within a confined coastal area in Western Europe, while the second film looks at human beings in the different urban environments of late-20th-century Europe. I will then argue that van der Keuken does not collapse the vital distinctions between umwelt and Lebenswelt, yet his films also succeed at reminding us of their constant interdependence.


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