The Personal Public Sphere of Whitman's 1840s Journalism

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (4) ◽  
pp. 983-998
Author(s):  
Bonnie Carr O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Social Community ◽  
The Public ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Penny Press ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
The Public Sphere

Before Walt Whitman became the self-celebrating poet of Leaves of Grass, he was a professional journalist. This paper examines the journalism Whitman produced from 1840 to 1842 in the context of an emerging celebrity culture, and it considers celebrity's effects on the public sphere. It traces the penny press's personal style of journalism to both its artisan-republican politics and the formation of celebrity culture, in which celebrities assume status parallel to that of traditional representatives of authority. As editor of the Aurora, Whitman adopts the first-person, polemical style of the penny press and singles out prominent people for criticism. In other pieces, he presents himself as the ever-observant flâneur. As editor and as flâneur, he is a participant in and observer of the life of his community, and he assumes unassailable interpretive power. But he also regards his readers as fellow participants-observers who make judgments about the public figures he reports on. The tension between these positions is never resolved: Whitman's dialogic addresses to readers aim to extend the public sphere of critical debate even as Whitman holds steadfastly to his own social and political authority. Encouraging and modeling readers' negotiations over the meaning of public figures, he extends the features of celebrity culture to the public at large. His early journalism shows how and why it is so difficult to reconcile political and social community in the era of mass culture, and it highlights the complexities of the coexistence of celebrity and critical discourse in the personal public sphere.

Soft Force

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Anne McLarney
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Women's Leadership ◽  
World Economic Forum ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Global Leader ◽  
World Economic ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter focuses on the work of Heba Raouf Ezzat. Ranked the thirty-ninth most influential Arab on Twitter, with over 100,000 followers, voted one of the hundred most powerful Arab women by ArabianBusiness.com, and elected a Youth Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, Raouf Ezzat has articulated and disseminated her Islamic politics in a global public sphere. Her writings and lectures develop an Islamic theory of women's political participation but simultaneously address other contested questions about women's leadership, women's work, and women's participation in the public sphere. Heba Raouf Ezzat is one of the most visible public figures in the Arab and Islamic world today, a visibility that began with her book on the question of women's political work in Islam, Woman and Political Work.

The Chaste Parricide: Murder, Femininity and the Subversion of Authority in the Reception of the First Performance of Shelley’s The Cenci, 1886

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-211
Author(s):  
Lee Michael-Berger
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
The Public ◽  
True Story ◽  
The Public Sphere

The story of The Cenci’s first production is intriguing, since the play, based on the true story of a sixteenth-century Roman family and revolving around the theme of parricide, was published in 1819 but was denied a licence for many years. The Shelley Society finally presented it in 1886, although it was vetoed by the Lord Chamberlain, and to avoid censorship it had to be proclaimed as a private event. This article examines the political and social context of the production, especially the reception of actress’s Alma Murray’s rendition of Beatrice, the parricide, thus probing the ways in which The Cenci question was reframed, and placed in the public sphere, despite censorship. The staging of the play became the site of a political debate and the performance – an act of defiance against institutionalised power, but also an act of defiance against the alleged tyranny of mass culture.

Ovid, the Res Publica, and the ‘Imperial Presidency’: Public Figures and Popular Freedoms in Augustan Rome and America

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Nandini B. Pandey
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Information Access ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Property ◽  
Imperial Presidency ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
The People ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Res Publica

Abstract How did Romans perceive the changing relationships among leaders, the people, and the public sphere as their commonwealth (res publica) fell under the control of an emperor? This paper examines Ovid’s uses of the Latin adjective publicus, ‘public, common, open’, to explore strands of implicitly ‘republican’ political thought behind his poetic corpus. Ovid first celebrates Augustus’ material benefactions as common goods for private consumption; then dramatises the tragic consequences of arbitrary domination; and finally, from exile, treats the emperor himself as a public property, subject to his people’s spectatorship and sovereignty of judgment. A final section draws on Ovid’s thinking on privacy, publicity, and information access to explore themes related to America’s ‘imperial presidency’, from the Founders’ emphasis on a free press to the recent interplay of secrecy, celebrity, and ‘sunshine’ laws.

scholarly journals TATTO0 MEANING RECONSTRUCTION IN TATTOO COMMUNITY MEMBERS

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-69
Author(s):  
Amir Dedoe
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Body Art ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Social Community ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Depth Interviews

This study aims to examine the meaning of the reality of individual social interest in body art tattooing or tattooing as an identity so that they bind themselves into a social community. Tattoos in Indonesia with the inherent negative stigmatization, have the complexity of debate in the dynamics of their presence in the public sphere. This paper presents one perspective, especially from the point of view of tattoo owners regarding their perceptions of the motives for tattooing that they do. By conducting observations and in-depth interviews in an effort to make a qualitative scientific explanation of the ownership motives of tattoos by community members. By triangulation techniques, the author builds a constructivist framework of the perception of tattoos in the community. This study found that a person's main motivation for having a tattoo is preceded by a desire to express artistic or artistic desires. When this accumulation of shared desires takes place, business motives and identity construction become a trigger for the formation of the tattoo community

Interwar Hungarian Entertainment Films and the Reinvention of Rural Modernity

Rural History ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-212
Author(s):  
ANNA MANCHIN
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Popular Films ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Modern Mass

AbstractIn interwar debates about Hungarian modernity, the countryside played a prominent symbolic role. For conservative nationalists, the Hungarian countryside became a symbol and source of authentic, ‘traditional’ Hungarian national culture, unchanging, hierarchical, ordered society and stable community, and national uniqueness. Entertainment films of the 1930s provided alternative representations of the countryside that upheld the possibility of modernising traditional Hungary. According to the films, modern Hungary would be created at the intersection and out of the cooperation between rural and urban, modern and traditional. The films questioned and challenged the idea that the rural was ‘pure’, authentic, untainted, but they also rejected the idea that it was shameful, hopelessly backward, or unable to change. Showing the countryside as both traditional and part of modern mass culture, as both nostalgically stable and an exotic vacationland, the films offered an integrative vision of Hungary which destabilised assumptions of both liberals and conservatives. Popular films used the countryside to provide a unique and alternative vision of modern Hungary that was integrative and reconciliatory; they provided an outlet for a liberal, democratic, capitalist perspective unavailable elsewhere in the public sphere.

Social Media and the Public Sphere in China

2017 ◽  
pp. 410-425
Author(s):  
Zhou Shan ◽  
Lu Tang
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
High Speed ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Political Discussion ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Train Derailment ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter seeks to answer the question of whether microblog can function as a promising form of public sphere. Utilizing a combined framework of public sphere based on the theories of Mouffe (1995) and Dahlgren (2005), it examines the political discussion and interrogation on Sina Weibo, China's leading microblog site, concerning the Wenzhou high-speed train derailment accident in July of 2011 through a critical discourse analysis. Its results suggest that Weibo enables the creation of new social imaginary and genre of discourse as well as the construction of new social identities.

Social Media and the Public Sphere in China

2020 ◽  
pp. 497-512
Author(s):  
Zhou Shan ◽  
Lu Tang
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
High Speed ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Political Discussion ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Train Derailment ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter seeks to answer the question of whether microblog can function as a promising form of public sphere. Utilizing a combined framework of public sphere based on the theories of Mouffe (1995) and Dahlgren (2005), it examines the political discussion and interrogation on Sina Weibo, China's leading microblog site, concerning the Wenzhou high-speed train derailment accident in July of 2011 through a critical discourse analysis. Its results suggest that Weibo enables the creation of new social imaginary and genre of discourse as well as the construction of new social identities.

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