Trevor Griffiths' ‘Absolute Beginners’: Socialist Humanism and the Television Studio

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-170
Author(s):  
Leah Panos
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Dramatic Structure ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Production Strategies ◽  
Convenient Category ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Personal Ethics ◽  
Television Studio

This article examines how conventional studio production strategies were active in the construction of political meaning in the 1974 television play ‘Absolute Beginners’, written by Trevor Griffiths. Produced for the BBC anthology series Fall of Eagles, the play dramatises Lenin's involvement with the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) and explores the contradictions between personal ethics and political necessity. Through close textual analysis and contextual discussion of other plays in the series, this piece demonstrates how shot patterns and spatial and performative devices in ‘Absolute Beginners’ supported the drama's socialist-humanist and feminist themes. Drawing on existing writing about the studio mode, it argues that the qualities of intimacy and presentational distance that it engendered were highly appropriate for the personal and the political dialectic in ‘Absolute Beginners’. While using authorship as a convenient category for referring to the coherence of Griffiths' thematic concerns and dramatic structure during this period, the article complicates notions of the television dramatist as author by arguing for the importance of visual style and showing how ‘ordinary’ studio form was operational in the play's political meanings.

scholarly journals Trevor Noah and the contingent politics of racial joking

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-48
Author(s):  
Jennalee Donian ◽  
Nicholas Holm
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Potential Sources ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Clear Line

This article takes up the transnational comedy career of Trevor Noah as a way to explore how the political work of racial comedy can manifest, circulate and indeed communicate differently across different racial-political contexts. Through the close textual analysis of two key comic performances –“The Daywalker” (2009) and “Son of Patricia” (2018), produced and (initially) circulated in South Africa and the USA, respectively – this article explores the extent to which Noah’s comic treatment of race has shifted between the two contexts. In particular, attention is paid to how Noah incites, navigates and mitigates potential sources of offence surrounding racial anxieties in the two contexts, and how he evokes his own “mixed-race” status in order to open up spaces of permission that allow him to joke about otherwise taboo subjects. Rejecting the claim that the politics of Noah’s comedy is emancipatory or progressive in any straightforward way, by means of formal analyses we argue that his comic treatment of race does not enact any singular politics, but rather that the political work of his racial humour shifts relative to its wider political contexts. Thus, rather than drawing a clear line between light entertainment and politically meaningful humour, this article argues that the political valence of racial joking can be understood as contingent upon wider discourses of race that circulate in national-cultural contexts.

Managing Decentralization: The Strategy of Institutional Differentiation in German Industrial Relations

1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 52-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Schroeder ◽  
Rainer Weinert
Keyword(s):  
Collective Bargaining ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Collective Bargaining Agreement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Institutional Differentiation ◽  
The Welfare State

The approach of the new millennium appears to signal the demiseof traditional models of social organization. The political core ofthis process of change—the restructuring of the welfare state—andthe related crisis of the industrywide collective bargaining agreementhave been subjects of much debate. For some years now inspecialist literature, this debate has been conducted between theproponents of a neo-liberal (minimally regulated) welfare state andthe supporters of a social democratic model (highly regulated). Thealternatives are variously expressed as “exit vs. voice,” “comparativeausterity vs. progressive competitiveness,” or “deregulation vs.cooperative re-regulation.”

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This book is a study of the political economy of Britain’s chief financial centre, the City of London, in the two decades prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government in 1979. The primary purpose of the book is to evaluate the relationship between the financial sector based in the City, and the economic strategy of social democracy in post-war Britain. In particular, it focuses on how the financial system related to the social democratic pursuit of national industrial development and modernization, and on how the norms of social democratic economic policy were challenged by a variety of fundamental changes to the City that took place during the period....

The Politics of Banking and Social Democracy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
Banking System ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Industrial Economy ◽  
The Social ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Demand

This chapter concerns the politics of managing the domestic banking system in post-war Britain. It examines the pressures brought to bear on the post-war settlement in banking during the 1960s and 1970s—in particular, the growth of new credit creating institutions and the political demand for more competition between banks. This undermined the social democratic model for managing credit established since the war. The chapter focuses in particular on how the Labour Party attempted in the 1970s to produce a banking system that was competitive, efficient, and able to channel credit to the struggling industrial economy.

Logikôs Argumentation in Aristotle’s Natural Science

Apeiron ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Woodcox
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Standard Domain

AbstractThis paper offers a novel interpretation of the nature and role of logical (logikôs) argumentation in Aristotle’s natural philosophy. In contrast to the standard domain interpretation, which makes logikôs argumentation the contrary of phusikôs, relying on principles drawn from outside the domain of natural science, I propose that the essential or defining feature of logikôs argumentation is the use of principles that are general relative to the question under investigation. My interpretation is developed and illustrated with a close textual analysis of Aristotle’s explanation of mule sterility in Generation of Animals II 8.

scholarly journals A Legitimate End to Illegitimate Beginning: A Critical Analysis of Mariam’s Character in A Thousand Splendid Suns

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 113
Author(s):  
Samina Akhtar ◽  
Muhammad Rauf ◽  
Saima Ikram ◽  
Gulrukh Raees
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Battered Woman ◽  
Feminist Literary Criticism ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Societal Attitude

This paper is an attempt to portray the plight of Mariam that she undergoes due to her illegitimate social status. The study focuses on the critical societal attitude towards the illegitimate unfortunate women. Mariam begins her life with a “harami” status; continues her struggle for personal identity, suffer and endures as a battered woman and leave this world as a woman of consequences by digging herself out of the lower social status that society attached to her. The study analyzes Mariam’s endurance, struggles and resistance in her strenuous journey to attain legitimate ending. The researcher used feminist literary criticism to interpret the text as a research methodology and adopted close textual analysis of the text by Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns.

scholarly journals The Advent of Ambedkar in the Sphere of Indian Women Question

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Poonam Singh
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Dalit Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Archival Study

The paper attempts to project Bhim Rao Ambedkar as one of the foremost liberal feminists who advocated for Hindu women’s legal rights through the constitutional provisions listed in the Hindu Code Bill. He proposed four major stipulations, “one change is that, the widow, the daughter, the widow of predeceased-son. All are given the same rank as the son in the matter of inheritance. In addition to that, the daughter is also given a share in her father’s property: her share is prescribed as half of that of the son.”[1] To contemplate the predicament and marginalized position of Indian women, Ambedkar posited that caste and gender are intertwined. The imposition of endogamy was made compulsory by Brahaminical hierarchy which eulogized by Hindu religious scriptures to ensure sustained subjectivity of women, which eventually depreciated the egalitarian position of women. The focal point of the research paper remains a close textual analysis of Ambedkarite canon with archival study and genealogical examination contouring the discourse. The paper also encompasses potent reasons to establish the differences between the marginalization of upper-caste women and Dalit women. Difference between them is maintained by the ‘graded inequality.’ After having observed such differences, the paper intends to extend the idea that Ambedkar worked as a socio-political champion for Dalit women and Indian women concomitantly. To guarantee the freedom, equality, and individuality of Indian women, Ambedkar resorted to legalized mechanism and constitutional provisions. Key Words: Ambedkar, Hindu Code Bill, Manusmriti, Indian Women, Dalit Women, Indian Feminism, Caste, Patriarchy

scholarly journals Features of Sense-Bearing Structure of Political Pre-Election PR Publications

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-334
Author(s):  
Elina Bulatova
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Comprehensive Approach ◽  
The Political ◽  
Direct Communication ◽  
Number Of Components ◽  
Substantial Growth ◽  
Subsequent Research ◽  
Bearing Structure ◽  
Logical Links

An election period involves a substantial growth in the flow of messages addressed to voters. News PR publications constitute a significant share of these messages; they have a number of structural and content features whose description with a comprehensive approach using linguo-stylistic and discursive textual analysis seems necessary to assess the political discourse’s impact potential. Pre-election PR publications modeling messages within non-direct communication include a dyadic sense-bearing structure evidenced by the presence of two main thoughts and two analytical estimates of the presented situations in the text’s logical pattern, corresponding to two addresser’s intentions – the explicit and the implicit one. Explicit elements have to do with the presentation of the publication’s newsworthy event; the implicit ones create a favorable image of the basic PR subject and contain recommendations of electoral nature. Such dual construction of media text’s sense-bearing structure is considered to be defective in the practice of literary editing but it is a certain pragmatic norm for political pre-election PR texts. Another feature of the abovementioned materials’ sense-bearing structure is the semantic uncertainty of a number of components and/or uncertainty of the logical links between them. Abandoning H. P. Grice’s premises – producing implicit meanings and semantically uncertain elements – has the purpose of creating an impacting effect whose assessment determines the prospects of subsequent research of news PR texts within the pre-election discourse.

scholarly journals The BBC’s Children in Need Telethon: The Currencies of Compassion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Lury
Keyword(s):  
National Health Service ◽  
Health Service ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
National Health ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Close Textual Analysis

This chapter illustrates how the BBC’s Children in Need telethon is informed and legitimated by different currency models as part of its aesthetic strategy. It demonstrates how these televisual currencies may be directly aligned with other kinds of medical currency models emerging within the economy of the UK’s National Health Service. Through close textual analysis of the programme and a related analysis of medical currency models proposed and piloted in relation to the NHS, it is argued that the ‘aestheticization’ of currency models provided by the programme reflects an ideological shift in the representation of medical care on public service television, in line with the ideology of neoliberalism and the incremental colonization of ‘financialization’ into all aspects of contemporary society.

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