Private Letters

Author(s):  
Natalie Naimark-Goldberg

This chapter discusses the role of personal correspondence as a vehicle for circulating ideas and opinions of enlightened Jewish women. The network of correspondence they sustained with many people in many cities in the German lands and even further afield constituted from their point of view a crucial means of participating in cultural discourse. Personal letters were an important channel through which these women could not only expand their horizons and acquire knowledge, but also demonstrate their intellectual abilities and participate in public discourse on literature, theatre, politics, and religion, among many other subjects. Thus, a study of their correspondence enables one to assess the involvement of these Jewish women in the contemporary world of culture — an involvement at times hidden from the public gaze and partly revealed in their epistles. Women also employed the epistolary form in order to participate in the intellectual activity of the Haskalah, but this happened only in a later period.

Author(s):  
Gaetano Dato

The chapter deals with the role of corpses in public memory during the Age of the World Wars in the North Adriatic borderland, where human remains had a momentous role in the clash among the area’s main collective identities: Italian, Slovenian and Croatian nationals, Habsburg authorities, Communists, Nazis, Fascists and new Fascists, and the Jewish community. In particular, corpses were actors in political-religious representations and a driving force in the period’s war propaganda. After 1945, human remains were contentious among conflicting factions and later became involved in trials against Nazi war criminals – regular public opinion has since underlined their fate. The analysis begins by recalling the public display and long spanning funeral of the mummified corpse of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his spouse, on the brink of the Great War in July 1914. The paper then explores other examples in use of corpses in the public discourse and pays careful attention to three case studies: the Redipuglia WW1 shrine, the pictures shot in winter 1943–44 of exhumed partisans’ enemies, and the victims’ ashes of the San Sabba Rice Mill lager.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 709-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura A. M. Stewart

AbstractThe deconstruction of what is termed “the public sphere” in recent decades has resulted in an important shift in scholarly attention towards networks and forms of association. This article explores how greater sensitivity to the unstable and ephemeral nature of “publics,” combined with a stronger awareness of the role of cultural exchange, has undoubtedly enriched our understanding of early modern politics. Some analytical precision has, nonetheless, been lost. A justifiable emphasis on the artificiality of the territorial borders that have defined units of enquiry has occurred at the expense of deeper consideration of the cultural boundaries that dictated the terms on which people could participate in and shape public discourse. Study of the British archipelago can offer new ways of thinking about these problems. Linguistic and ethnic differences, the search for religious concord as well as the reality of confessional division, institutional variation, and the consequences of London's increasing dominance of the archipelago, are key facets of the reassessments undertaken here. The article concludes by reflecting on how interactions between varieties of “public” and other forms of association can nuance our understanding of early modern state formation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-98
Author(s):  
Dionysia Mylonaki ◽  
Panagiotis Tigas

Computational censorship in the form of fake news and toxic comments regulation is a subject that comes up quite often in the public discourse, as a result of the volatile political circumstances on a global scale and due to the unquestionable impact of journalism on these circumstances. Public attention has been directed to the role of mainstream and other media in the formation of public opinion, either in the form of articles or in the form of usergenerated comments. The purpose is to analyse and allow a deeper understanding of a project that is under development, namely, computational-censorship and to show that algorithmic regulation is not a solution, but rather another layer to a more fundamental problem. This article examines the implicationsof developing Machine Leraning/Artificial Iintelligence (ML/AI) which aims to regulate the internet and we attempt to allow a glimpse into the technical aspect of the problem as a way to back arguments that could be re-jected by the ML/AI research community as “non-pragmatic”. Finally, it aims to highlight the absurdity of the current approach to research in this area, which is the exact opposite of the rationalism that the field claims to be embracing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-89
Author(s):  
Ahmad Yasid ◽  
Moh Juhdi

Abstract   Islam, religion of tolerance and love of peace is one of Habiburrahman El Shirazy’s, it is a study indicating the values ​​of love and tolerance of Islam in the modern public space area. This study used the underlying theory of the values ​​of love and tolerance as well as the role of Islam in modern times that has been developing in the public discourse that in the history of human civilization there are several things that must be understood that humans have the sense to differentiate between humans and other creatures. From this reason humans can do something to explore and explain things that are not known by others. The method that is used in data collection technique is documentation technique, because this study is descriptive qualitative. This study examines several things including the values of love and tolerance because accepting differences is a distinct pleasure for each particular societies in other words, not seeing other people as deviants or enemies but as partner to complement each other by having an equal position and equally valid and valuable as a way of managing life and living life both individually and collectively. Acceptance of differences demands changes in the legal rule in people's lives so that the role of religion in the modern public space area becomes a middle way to build diversity and a nature that must both appreciate and respect one another, this diversity is seen in the portrait of everyday life which then creates peace, and harmony in interacting with all elements of society.    


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Atanas Totlyakov ◽  
◽  
◽  

This text discusses some key points of contemporary theoretical concepts of intersubjectivity in the context of a specific group of creative practice. Emphasis is placed on the role and specificity of an area of joint attention shared between individuals, and interpersonal inclusions, which are essential for the creation and presentation to the public of objects and images. The problems of the temporary and non-permanent connection between the intentional subjects and the role of other acting forces, both quasisubjects and quasi-objects, within the framework of an art project developing in time are touched upon. The conventional contemporary critical analysis of a work of art has been replaced by ideas of visual culture and a body-oriented approach to tracing processes that are complemented from a sociological point of view.


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 844-864
Author(s):  
Eric Linhart ◽  
Oke Bahnsen

The German electoral law to the federal parliament was reformed in 2011 and in 2013 . While political scientists have extensively evaluated consequences of these reforms, the role of the public discourse has been largely neglected . We analyze articles from three leading German newspapers (FAZ, SZ, Welt) on this topic and find the debate around the reforms to be dominated by parties and political institutions . Scientists, interest groups, and journalists have only played minor roles . Regarding content, the discourse largely focused on surplus seats, reform speed, and a proposal by the CDU/CSU‑FDP coalition government in 2011 . A broad public debate in which multiple social groups could participate has not taken place . From a normative perspective this is problematic since the lack of a public debate might have contributed to the poor quality of the reform’s result .


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 367-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wojciech Woźniak

Sport mega events are the most prominent manifestations of the multidimensional and global interrelation between sport and politics. The purpose of the paper is to present the contrasting cases of two Polish SMEs: UEFA European Championships in football (Euro, 2012) and the bid for Winter Olympic Games Cracow 2022. This article pays special attention to the role of Polish political elite in promoting both events and to the grassroots movement that effectively ended the bidding for the latter event. It also discusses how the allegedly successful Euro 2012 tournament was presented in the public discourse in order to avoid conflicts and debates about the very idea of hosting the games. This proved unsuccessful in the latter case. This case deserves scrutiny as it is an unusual example of effective bottom up mobilization of civil society against the whole political elite.


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 508-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lotta Lehti

The article shows that while public discourse is claimed to be undergoing a process of conversationalisation – i.e. adopting features of casual and informal communicative situations – this process does not apply to any great extent to French politicians’ blogs. The parameters investigated in a corpus of 80 politicians’ blog posts during September 2007 are private and informal topics, and conversation-like interaction. The main focus of the study is on the minority of blogs in the material which are in fact conversationalised. These blogs are examined from the point of view of persuasion, as devices in constructing a credible image of the author. The results show that while these few conversationalised blogs construct an image of the author as an ‘ordinary’ person close to the public, the majority of the blogs create an authorial image as a remote political expert. The extent to which the construction of a lay image is successful, however, is questioned in the analysis.


2015 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 1094-1114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Martínez-Ávila ◽  
Richard Smiraglia ◽  
Hur-Li Lee ◽  
Melodie Fox

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss and shed light on the following questions: What is an author? Is it a person who writes? Or, is it, in information, an iconic taxonomic designation (some might say a “classification”) for a group of writings that are recognized by the public in some particular way? What does it mean when a search engine, or catalog, asks a user to enter the name of an author? And how does that accord with the manner in which the data have been entered in association with the names of the entities identified with the concept of authorship? Design/methodology/approach – The authors use several cases as bases of phenomenological discourse analysis, combining as best the authors can components of eidetic bracketing (a Husserlian technique for isolating noetic reduction) with Foucauldian discourse analysis. The two approaches are not sympathetic or together cogent, so the authors present them instead as alternative explanations alongside empirical evidence. In this way the authors are able to isolate components of iconic “authorship” and then subsequently engage them in discourse. Findings – An “author” is an iconic name associated with a class of works. An “author” is a role in public discourse between a set of works and the culture that consumes them. An “author” is a role in cultural sublimation, or a power broker in deabstemiation. An “author” is last, if ever, a person responsible for the intellectual content of a published work. The library catalog’s attribution of “author” is at odds with the Foucauldian discursive comprehension of the role of an “author.” Originality/value – One of the main assets of this paper is the combination of Foucauldian discourse analysis with phenomenological analysis for the study of the “author.” The authors turned to Foucauldian discourse analysis to discover the loci of power in the interactions of the public with the named authorial entities. The authors also looked to phenomenological analysis to consider the lived experience of users who encounter the same named authorial entities. The study of the “author” in this combined way facilitated the revelation of new aspects of the role of authorship in search engines and library catalogs.


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