scholarly journals S.N. Behrman, Comedy, and the Extermination of the Jews: Broadway, Christmas Eve, 1934

Modern Drama ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-418
Author(s):  
Martin Harries
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Political Force ◽  
The Public ◽  
Wide Reading ◽  
Comedy Of Manners ◽  
The Public Sphere

S.N. Behrman’s Rain from Heaven premiered on Broadway on Christmas Eve, 1934. In the play, Hugo Willens, a refugee from Nazi Germany, describes a pamphlet he had written in Germany that led to his exile: the satirical pamphlet narrates the extermination of all the Jews but one. Tracking Behrman’s wide reading, which he recorded in his diaries, shows that anticipation of genocide was widely shared by writers in the public sphere to which he belonged. Behrman intended the story of the last Jew as a joke, as some of his audience understood, but it was a joke with political force. The fictional comic pamphlet was part of a larger project of remaking the comedy of manners for the purposes of anti-Nazi resistance.

Money, Sex, and God: The Erotic Logic of Religious Nationalism

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Friedland
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Religious Nationalism ◽  
Political Force ◽  
The Public ◽  
Institutional Approach ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Religion And Nationalism ◽  
National Control

God is once again afoot in the public sphere. Politics has become a religious obligation. For a new breed of religious nationalist the nation-state is a vehicle of the divine. This essay seeks to accomplish four things. The first is to argue for an institutional approach to religious nationalism in order both to interpret and explain it. Second, I argue that religion and nationalism partake of a common symbolic order and that religious nationalism is therefore not an oxymoron. Third, the essay seeks to explain why religion has become such a potent political force in our time. And fourth—the task that will take up the bulk of the text—it seeks a principle of intelligibility in the semiotic order of religious nationalism that can comprehend its preoccupation with both women's erotic bodies and monies out of national control.

The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

Habermas, Cultural Hegemony, and the Educational Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Arabic Speaking

This study explores Habermas’s work in terms of the relevance of his theory of the public sphere to the politics and poetics of the Arab oral tradition and its pedagogical practices. In what ways and forms does Arab heritage inform a public sphere of resistance or dissent? How does Habermas’s notion of the public space help or hinder a better understanding of the Arab oral tradition within the sociopolitical and educational landscape of the Arabic-speaking world? This study also explores the pedagogical implications of teaching Arab orality within the context of the public sphere as a contested site that informs a mode of resistance against social inequality and sociopolitical exclusions.

The Dynamics of Egypt’s “Semi-opposition,” 2004–11

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 83-103
Author(s):  
Mai Mogib Mosad
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political System ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship

This paper maps the basic opposition groups that influenced the Egyptian political system in the last years of Hosni Mubarak’s rule. It approaches the nature of the relationship between the system and the opposition through use of the concept of “semi-opposition.” An examination and evaluation of the opposition groups shows the extent to which the regime—in order to appear that it was opening the public sphere to the opposition—had channels of communication with the Muslim Brotherhood. The paper also shows the system’s relations with other groups, such as “Kifaya” and “April 6”; it then explains the reasons behind the success of the Muslim Brotherhood at seizing power after the ousting of President Mubarak.

I Think We’re Alone Now

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 183-210
Author(s):  
Erin Nunoda
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Images ◽  
Empty Space ◽  
The Public ◽  
Youtube Videos ◽  
The Public Sphere

This article examines YouTube videos (primarily distributed by a user named Cecil Robert) that document so-called dead malls: unpopulated, unproductive, but not necessarily demolished consumerist sites that have proliferated in the wake of the 2008 recession. These works link digital images of mall interiors with pop-song remixes so as to re-create the experience of hearing a track while standing within the empty space; manipulating the songs’ audio frequencies heightens echo effects and fosters an impression of ghostly dislocation. This article argues that these videos locate a potentiality in abandoned mall spaces for the exploration of queer (non)relations. It suggests that the videos’ emphasis on lonely, unconsummated intimacies questions circuitous visions of the public sphere, participatory dynamics online, and the presumably conservative biopolitics (both at its height and in its memorialization) of mall architecture.

The public and the private: reconfiguring the interrelationship during a civil act

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Natalia Kostenko
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Physical Interaction ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

The subject matter of research interest here is the movement of sociological reflection concerning the interplay of public and private realms in social, political and individual life. The focus is on the boundary constructs embodying publicity, which are, first of all, classical models of the space of appearance for free citizens of the polis (H. Arendt) and the public sphere organised by communicative rationality (Ju. Habermas). Alternative patterns are present in modern ideas pertaining to the significance of biological component in public space in the context of biopolitics (M. Foucault), “inclusive exclusion of bare life” (G. Agamben), as well as performativity of corporeal and linguistic experience related to the right to participate in civil acts such as popular assembly (J. Butler), where the established distinctions between the public and the private are levelled, and the interrelationship of these two realms becomes reconfigured. Once the new media have come into play, both the structure and nature of the public sphere becomes modified. What assumes a decisive role is people’s physical interaction with online communication gadgets, which instantly connect information networks along various trajectories. However, the rapid development of information technology produces particular risks related to the control of communications industry, leaving both public and private realms unprotected and deforming them. This also urges us to rethink the issue of congruence of the two ideas such as transparency of societies and security.

Compressed Identity

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 13-35
Author(s):  
H. Şule Albayrak
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Depth Interviews

For decades the authoritarian secularist policies of the Turkish state, by imposing a headscarf ban at universities and in the civil service, excluded practising Muslim women from the public sphere until the reforms following 2010. However, Muslim women had continued to seek ways to increase their knowledge and improve their intellectual levels, not only as individuals, but also by establishing civil associations. As a result, a group of intellectual women has emerged who are not only educated in political, social, and economic issues, but who are also determined to attain their socio-economic and political rights. Those new actors in the Turkish public sphere are, however, concerned with being labeled as either “feminist,” “fundamentalist” or “Islamist.” This article therefore analyzes the distance between the self-identifications of intellectual Muslim women and certain classifications imposed on them. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with thirteen Turkish intellectual Muslim women were carried out which reveal that they reject and critique overly facile labels due to their negative connotations while offering more complex insights into their perspectives on Muslim women, authority, and identity.

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