Nasty resurrections

Author(s):  
Johnny Walker

Chapter 3, in light of the broader international concerns outlined in the previous chapter, works towards locating cultural specificities within British horror at a time when it has drifted from its better known ‘English’ heritage. By considering the social and historical context during which many contemporary filmmakers grew up (namely, the late 1970s and 1980s), I reassess how recent British horror’s ‘heritage’ may be more immediate than we initially presume. To do this, I argue that several films responded to the typically negative British critical response to horror cinema (Petley 2002a), and, through textual analysis, argue that such films are products inspired by nostalgia for the video nasties panic of the 1980s. Through doing so, I consider how cultural specificity can be extracted from films by directors who not only have a passion for the horror film (that is, are self-confessed fans of the genre), but are also aware of how British horror (and horror in Britain) has been figured and derided within British culture.

Author(s):  
Johnny Walker

In Chapter 4, I extend some of the issues surrounding fan filmmakers as discussed in the previous chapter, and deliberate the representation of masculinity and cult film fandom within a series of horror-comedy hybrids. Through acknowledgement of the ways in which cult film fandom has traditionally been gendered as ‘male’, and often as immature, crude and boyish, I draw parallels between recent horror-comedies that use these stereotypes as ironic self-critiques of the filmmakers’ themselves and their desired audience. I ultimately locate these films within discourses surrounding ‘New Lad’ culture of the 1990s, which has similarly been linked to contemporary cult film fandom (Hollows 2003; Read 2003). Through a discussion of themes, industry statistics and textual analysis, I show how films such as Shaun of the Dead, Doghouse and Lesbian Vampire Killers satirise the social marginality of laddish behaviour by placing fannish ‘New Lad’ types within a horror film environment, thus literalising many of the stereotypes that have figured within contemporary academic writing on cult film audiences.


Author(s):  
Rosemary J. Jolly

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be


Author(s):  
Gabriela Soto Laveaga

In my brief response to Terence Keel’s essay “Race on Both Sides of the Razor,” I focus on something as pertinent as alleles and social construction: how we write history and how we memorialize the past. Current DNA analysis promises to remap our past and interrogate certainties that we have taken for granted. For the purposes of this commentary I call this displacing of known histories the epigenetics of memory. Just as environmental stimuli rouse epigenetic mechanisms to produce lasting change in behavior and neural function, the unearthing of forgotten bodies, forgotten lives, has a measurable effect on how we act and think and what we believe. The act of writing history, memorializing the lives of others, is a stimulus that reshapes who and what we are. We cannot disentangle the discussion about the social construction of race and biological determinism from the ways in which we have written—and must write going forward—about race. To the debate about social construction and biological variation we must add the heft of historical context, which allows us to place these two ideas in dialogue with each other. Consequently, before addressing the themes in Keel’s provocative opening essay and John Hartigan’s response, I speak about dead bodies—specifically, cemeteries for Black bodies. Three examples—one each from Atlanta, Georgia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Mexico—illustrate how dead bodies must enter our current debates about race, science, and social constructions. 


2021 ◽  
pp. 019145372199070
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Rustighi

In this article, I engage with what relevant literature addresses as the ‘paradox of democracy’ and trace it back to the dialectic between authorization and representation established by social contract theories. To make my argument, I take Rousseau’s Social Contract as a paradigmatic example of the paradox and analyse it in light of Hegel’s critical response. My aim is to show that, although Rousseau rejects the idea of representing the popular will, representation resurfaces in his Republic from top to bottom and engenders a structural opposition between citizens and rulers: drawing on the Hegelian scrutiny of contractarianism, I focus on three key moments in Rousseau’s theory, namely the Lawgiver, the majority rule and the executive power. After illustrating how the social contract undermines democratic participation in deliberative processes, I suggest that Hegel’s philosophy of right overcomes the paradox by positively assuming it as a dialectical contradiction that requires a specific constitutional approach to democracy. In this sense, I argue, the Hegelian perspective on democratic deliberation helps us to better frame Rousseau’s ambition to conceive the Republic as a free community of equals and urges us to elaborate a more coherent understanding of participation in a pluralistic society.


2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 413-438
Author(s):  
Eszter Bartha

Abstract The article seeks to place the workers’ road from socialism to capitalism in East Germany and Hungary in a historical context. It offers an overview of the most important elements of the party’s policy towards labour in the two countries under the Honecker and the Kádár regime respectively. It examines the highly paternalistic role of the factory as a life-long employer and provider of workers’ needs for the large industrial working class which the regime considered to be its main social basis. Given that the thesis of the working class as the ruling class was central to the legitimating ideology of the state socialist regimes, dissident intellectuals challenging this thesis were effectively marginalized or forced into exile. After the change of regimes, the “working class” again became an ideological term associated with the discredited and fallen regime. The article analyses the changes within the life-world of East German and Hungarian workers in the light of life-history interviews. It argues that in Hungary, the social and material decline of the workers – alongside the loss of the symbolic capital of the working class – reinforced ethno-centric, nationalistic narratives, which juxtaposed “globalization” and “national capitalism”, the latter supposedly protecting citizens from the exploitation by global capital. In the light of the sad reports of falling standards of living and impoverishment, the Kádár regime received an ambiguous, often nostalgic evaluation. While the East Germans were also critical of the new, capitalist society (unemployment, intensified competition for jobs, the disintegration of the old, work-based communities), they gave more credit to the post-socialist democratic institutions. They were more willing to reconcile the old socialist values which they had appreciated in the GDR with a modern left-wing critique than their Hungarian counterparts, for whom nationalism seemed to offer the only means to express social criticism.


2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Rose Sawyer

The Church of Ireland in the later seventeenth century faced many challenges. After two decades of war and effective suppression, the church in 1660 had to reestablish itself as the national church of the kingdom of Ireland in the face of opposition from both Catholics and Dissenters, who together made up nearly ninety percent of the island's population. While recent scholarship has illuminated Irish protestantism as a social group during this period, the theology of the established church remains unexamined in its historical context. This article considers the theological arguments used by members of the church hierarchy in sermons and tracts written between 1660 and 1689 as they argued that the Church of Ireland was both a true apostolic church and best suited for the security and salvation of the people of Ireland. Attention to these concerns shows that the social and political realities of being a minority church compelled Irish churchmen to focus on basic arguments for an episcopal national establishment. It suggests that this focus on first principles allowed the church a certain amount of ecclesiological flexibility that helped it survive later turbulence such as the non-jurors controversy of 1689–1690 fairly intact.


2021 ◽  
pp. 79-113
Author(s):  
A.N. Veraksa ◽  
N.E. Veraksa

The review is devoted to the relationship between executive functions and metacognition in the context of a cultural-historical perspective. On the basis of the research carried out over the past 15 years, the commonality and differences of these constructs are shown. Special attention is paid to the development of executive functions and metacognition, their connection with the academic success of children, the role of the social aspect in their formation. The importance of an adult in the directed formation of metacognition and self-regulation is shown, which confirms the provisions of the cultural-historical theory. Within the framework of the cultural-historical paradigm, several mechanisms for the development of executive functions are considered: imitation based on understanding; sign mediation; as well as communication in a social developmental situation. L.S. Vygotsky noted that higher mental functions arise on the basis of real interactions of people, are interiorized, turning into psychological functions. The review showed that one of the most common models of the structure of executive functions is a model that includes such components as “working memory”, “inhibitory control” and “cognitive flexibility”. Based on the analysis, it is possible to assert the influence of J. Piaget’s concept on the development of executive functions. A certain difficulty is caused by the explanation of emotional regulation in the context of metacognitive problems. At the same time, L.S. Vygotsky spoke about the unity of affect and intellect, which suggests the existence behavioral control and, in particular, of emotional processes at the level of metacognitive processes.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rose Anna O'Rorke Plumridge

<p>This thesis is a scholarly edition of Katherine Mansfield’s Urewera Notebook. The General Introduction summarises the purpose to which the notebook has been put by previous editors and biographers, as evidence for Mansfield’s happiness or unhappiness in New Zealand throughout 1906-8. It then offers an overview of the historical context in which the notebook was written, in order to demonstrate the social complexity and geographical diversity of the terrain that Mansfield covered during her 1907 camping holiday. This is followed by an analysis of Mansfield’s attitudes towards colonials, Maori and the New Zealand landscape. Mansfield’s notebook is permeated by a sense of disdain for colonials, especially when encountered as tourists, but also a fascination with ‘back-block ’settlers and a sense of camaraderie with her travelling companions. Mansfield repeatedly romanticised Maori as a noble ‘dying race’ with a mythic past, but was also insightfully observant of the predicament of Maori incontemporary colonial society. Her persistent references to European flora, fauna and ‘high culture’, and her delight in conventionally picturesque English gardens, reveal a certain disconnect from the New Zealand landscape, yet occasional vivid depictionsof the country hint at a developing facility for evokingNew Zealand through literature.In the Textual Introduction I discuss the approaches of the three prior editors of the notebook: John Middleton Murry polished, and selectively reproduced, the Urewera Notebook, to depict Mansfield as an eloquent diarist; Ian A. Gordon rearranged his transcription and couched it within an historical commentary which was interspersed with subjective observation, to argue that Mansfield was an innate short story writer invigorated by her homeland. Margaret Scott was a technically faithful transcriber who providedaccuracy at the level of sentence structure but whoseminimal scholarly apparatus has madeher edition of the notebook difficult to navigate,and has obscured what Mansfield wrote. I have re-transcribed the notebook, deciphering many words and phrases differently from prior editors. The Editorial Procedures are intended as an improvement on the editorial methods of prior editors.The transcription itself is supported by a collation of all significant variant readings of prior editions. Arunning commentary describesthe notebook’s physical composition, identifies colonial and Maori people mentioned in the text, and explains ambiguous historical and literary allusions, native flora and fauna,and expressions in Te Reo Maori. The Itinerary uses historical documents to provide a factually accurate description of the route that Mansfield followed, and revises the itinerary suggested by Gordon in 1978. A biographical register explains the social background of the camping party. This thesis is based on fresh archival research of primary history material in the Alexander Turnbull Library, legal land ownership documents at Archives New Zealand, historical newspapersand information from discussions with Warbrick and Bird family descendants.A map sourced from the Turnbull Cartography Collection shows contemporary features and settlements, with the route of the camping party superimposed. Facsimiles of pages from the notebook are included to illustrate Mansfield’s handwriting and idiosyncratic entries. Photographs have been selected from Beauchamp family photograph albums at the Turnbull, from the Ebbett Papers at the Hawke’s Bay MuseumTheatre Gallery, and from private records.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 744-765 ◽  
Author(s):  
Imogen Tyler

This article offers a critical re-reading of the understanding of stigma forged by the North American sociologist Erving Goffman in his influential Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). One of the most widely read and cited sociologists in history, Goffman was already famous when Stigma was published in 1963. His previous books were best-sellers and Stigma alone has sold an astonishing 800,000 copies in the 50 years since its publication. Given its considerable influence, it is surprising how little sustained engagement there has been with the historicity of Goffman’s account. This article resituates Goffman’s conceptualisation of stigma within the historical context of Jim Crow and the Black freedom struggles that were shaking ‘the social interaction order’ to its foundations at the very moment he crafted his account. It is the contention of this article that these explosive political movements against the ‘humiliations of racial discrimination’ invite revision of Goffman’s decidedly apolitical account of stigma. This historical revision of Goffman’s stigma concept builds on an existing body of critical work on the relationship between race, segregation and the epistemology of sociology within the USA. Throughout, it reads Goffman’s Stigma through the lens of ‘Black Sociology’, a field of knowledge that here designates not only formal sociological scholarship, but political manifestos, journalism, creative writing, oral histories and memoirs. It is the argument of this article that placing Goffman’s concept of stigma into critical dialogue with Black epistemologies of stigma allows for a timely reconceptualisation of stigma as governmental technologies of dehumanisation that have long been collectively resisted from below.


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