Fagin's Coin of Truth: Economic Belief and Representation inOliver Twist

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-138
Author(s):  
Keith Clavin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Secondary Markets ◽  
Jewish Culture

This essay examines Fagin from Oliver Twist as a villain whose construction joins Victorian anxieties about counterfeiting and economic deceptiveness with separate yet related concerns about the author's role in representing criminal life. Dickens triangulates Fagin's identity through cultural fears about Jewish participation within secondary markets, increased distance between purchaser and seller in an expanding credit economy, and moral ambiguities in respect to fiction-making. Read against non-literary Victorian writing about counterfeiters and crime, Fagin can be understood as a forger of identities and narratives. His ability to exploit interpersonal belief and economic value is a central feature of his villainy and one with precedent in other aspects of Victorian financial life. Dickens critiques capitalist culture by associating it with the imitative, fictional, and Jewish culture. In contrast, he aligns sincerity and truth with the middle-class, normative characters. Throughout, he marks the distinction between these two groups with comic incidence. The marginalised figures are fodder for humour and irony, while the conventional heroes are earnest.

Middle class ideologies: Norms and historical changes.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Huynh ◽  
Igor Grossmann
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Intergroup Dynamics ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Historical Trends ◽  
Societal Norms ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Behavioral Tendencies ◽  
American Society ◽  
Definition Of

Ever since social scientists became interested in understanding intergroup dynamics, the topic of the “middle class” and its distinction from other groups in society became the central feature of a theoretical and empirical research enterprise. In this overview essay we discuss the beliefs, values and behavioral tendencies attributed to American middle class beliefs, and discuss their implications for understanding class-related norms and values. We end with a reflection over the historical trends that impact societal norms and the definition of middle class in the American society.

Chasing Innovation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilly Irani
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Indian Children ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Political Structures

Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? This book shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. The book documents the rise of “entrepreneurial citizenship” in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world's fastest-growing nations. The book chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one billion people, most of whom are poor. While discussions of entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, the book warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to generate economic value. The book argues that the move to recast social change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames others—craftspeople, workers, and activists—as of lower value, or even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development. The book lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a world where good ideas supposedly rule all.

The Delicatessen as an Icon of Secular Jewishness

Jewishness ◽  
2008 ◽  
pp. 195-210
Author(s):  
Ted Merwin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Postmodern Theory ◽  
Functional Relations ◽  
Ritual Space

This chapter focuses on the Jewish delicatessen, a recognizable symbol of American Jewish culture. Today, the deli has become so identified with Jews that it has become a symbol for Jewish life in general. Jews and delis are inextricably linked in the American popular imagination. Moreover, Jewish food lies at the heart of contemporary ‘secular’ Jewish identity. Drawing on historical research, images, and representations of the deli in pop culture, as well as postmodern theory, the chapter demonstrates the functional relations between the deli as a central ritual space of secular Jewishness and the ways in which deli food is both commodified and nostalgicized to make the deli a Jewish cultural signpost. Indeed, this symbolic role is increasing as actual delis close, at least in the New York area, where they once were a central feature of the urban landscape and a crucial repository of Jewish culture.

Brother Singulars

2020 ◽  
pp. 38-61
Author(s):  
Amy Feinstein
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Cultural Ideals ◽  
Modern Writer ◽  
The Arts

Chapter 2 explores Stein’s use of Arnold’s Hebraism in her first fictions to signal the Jewish morality of her middle-class characters. In 1903, Stein wrote the novella Q.E.D. and the brief first draft of her novel The Making of Americans. In both works, she presents ill-fated romances between ethically-Jewish and more aesthetically-inclined characters. In Q.E.D., she allusively depicts the Jewish identity of her protagonist Adele, who finds herself in a love affair with the aptly named Helen. Adele’s frequent lamentations have biblical roots in texts attributed to the prophet Jeremiah. Stein closes the novella with her characters in a romantic stalemate, but her romance fusing Arnoldian Hebraism and Hellenism as an ideal of Jewish culture had just begun. The affianced couple in the first draft of The Making of Americans espouses Stein’s Arnoldian fusion. The novel’s paterfamilial voice of Hebraism dismisses as “modern” the Hellenic inclinations towards the arts by the young heroine and her fiancé. Similar to Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce, Stein, in her revising of Arnold, imagines the modern writer, her Brother Singular, as one of a plurality of individuals whose typologically Jewish cultural ideals combine the ethical traditions of the Hebrew with the intellectually liberating creativity of the Hellene.

Narratives and Goals

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 303-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon M. Laham ◽  
Yoshihisa Kashima
Keyword(s):  
High Achievement ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Behavioral Task ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Goal Priming ◽  
Behavioral Assimilation ◽  
Construct Accessibility

Goals are a central feature of narratives, and, thus, narratives may be particularly potent means of goal priming. Two studies examined two features of goal priming (postdelay behavioral assimilation and postfulfillment accessibility) that have been theorized to distinguish goal from semantic construct priming. Across the studies, participants were primed with high achievement, either in a narrative or nonnarrative context and then completed either a behavioral task, followed by a measure of construct accessibility, or a behavioral task after a delay. Indicative of goal priming, narrative-primed participants showed greater postdelay behavioral assimilation and less postfulfillment accessibility than those exposed to the nonnarrative prime. The implications of goal priming from narratives are discussed in relation to both theoretical and methodological issues.

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