scholarly journals Their Labyrinth Mouths of History

Linguaculture ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-144
Author(s):  
Marcela Sulak
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Historical Moment

This paper outlines reading strategies to help map Hart Crane’s book-length poem, The Bridge, as a repository of American runes and writing. Contextualizing the poem in the philosophical, historical, and popular culture that influenced its creation, we can examine Hart Crane’s linguistic condensation, puns, and etymological play as techniques for balancing the clash between eternity and secular history upon which America was founded, rehearsed in The Bridge in the clash between secular a-temporality and the historical moment.

Levinas as a Reader of Jewish Texts

2018 ◽  
pp. 442-458
Author(s):  
Ethan Kleinberg
Keyword(s):  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Related Issue ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
And Training ◽  
Do So

This article attempts to understand Levinas as a reader of Jewish texts, with particular attention paid to his Talmudic commentaries. To do so, the entangled relation between oral and written texts is explored; one must be able to properly “read” but also “write,” and there is the related issue of the methodology and training to be able to do so properly. Levinas offers commentary on each issue. Several interpretations of Talmudic texts and an important discussion of reading Scripture are analyzed in order to elucidate Levinas’s reading strategies, what this tells us about his relation to the larger tradition of Talmudic commentary, and Levinas’s particular historical moment, especially the role of the Holocaust for his approach to reading the Talmud and traditional texts.

scholarly journals Et Tu Ru? Entrepreneurship and the Commodification of Drag in RuPaul’s Drag Race

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Buck
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Reality Tv ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Drag Queen ◽  
The Face ◽  
Value Changes ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Tv Show ◽  
International Success ◽  
Selection Of

Historically, drag is a taboo which has been marginalized in the face of centuries of repression against non-heteronormative activity. Yet today drag has become highly visible in popular culture, and this is in large part attributable to the international success of American reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-present). Its bold representation of drag on a mainstream television show is unprecedented and the selection of drag queen competitors by the show’s producers has demonstrated a plethora of representations as Drag Race showcases a diverse range of identifications from the world of drag performance. The blossoming of Drag Race’s success comes at a historical moment in which we are seeing a huge proliferation of queer representations (re)produced in US television and other media over the last decade. However, as I will argue, the apparent liberalization of drag queens in popular culture is not simply a celebration of so-called ‘progress’ in the recognition of the marginalized, but may also be prompting the promotion of other value changes within late capitalism’s ideals of consumerism and entrepreneurship. Contestants are increasingly pressured to construct their drag performances to conform to a recognizable brand to reach the heights of their own private ‘success’. Mainstreamed depictions of queer subjects are susceptible to co-option, particularly in televisual forms such as Drag Race which prospers by channelling the emancipatory and subversive desires of the subculture. Through trans-textual considerations and historical contextualizations, I show how the representation of drag in Drag Race is depoliticized through neoliberal discourse as the show’s continual demand for competitors to ‘work it’ privileges and maintains the impetus for competitive profitmaking above the needs and demands of disempowered groups.

Emotional landscapes of reading: fan fiction in the context of contemporary reading practices

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Samutina
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Reading First ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Literary Experience

This article focuses on fan fiction as a literary experience and especially on fan fiction readers’ receptive strategies. Methodologically, its approach is at the intersection of literary theory, theory of popular culture, and qualitative research into practices of communication within online communities. It characterizes fan fiction as a type of contemporary reading and writing. Taking as an example the Russian Harry Potter fan fiction community, the article poses a set of questions about the meanings and contexts of immersive reading and affective reading. The emotional reading of fan fiction communities is put into historical and theoretical context, with reference to researchers who analysed and criticized the dichotomy of rational and affective reading, or ‘enchantment’, in literary culture as one of the symptoms of modernity. The metaphor of ‘emotional landscapes of reading’ is used to theorize the reading strategies of fan fiction readers, and discussed through parallels with phenomenological theories of landscape. Among the ‘assemblage points of reading’ of fan fiction, specific elements are described, such as ‘selective reading’, ‘kink reading’, ‘first encounter with fan fiction texts’ and ‘unpredictability’.

Freaks in the Reagan Era

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogel
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Reagan Era ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Michael Jackson

This chapter draws on Baldwin’s 1985 essay, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” to examine how the Reagan-era ideal of masculinity was delineated and contested in popular culture. By the 1980s, Baldwin contends, Americans continued to cling to an ideal of masculinity “so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.” The chapter situates Baldwin’s essay in its historical moment, considering the rise and backlash to androgynous black “crossover” artists such as Michael Jackson and Prince, and the challenges they posed to the decade’s more traditional representations of American manhood (among them, Reagan, Rambo, and Bruce Springsteen).

Workers, Management, and the Right to Smoke during World War II

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Wood
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Military Service ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Ford Motor Company ◽  
General Motors ◽  
World War ◽  
The Right ◽  
Historical Moment

This chapter explains that World War II was a major historical moment when cigarettes became respectable in American culture and soon became permissible in the industrial workplace. Wartime popular culture connected smoking to military service and support for soldiers' sacrifices, making the cigarette an acceptable and respectable symbol of patriotic expression. At the same time, workers pressed employers for the right to smoke on the job, and smoking disputes played a significant role in several strikes in the automobile-turned-defense plants of Michigan. By 1950, many major employers such as General Motors and the Ford Motor Company had rescinded their bans on smoking.

‘Retailed to all posterity’: Post-truth, oral tradition, and the popular voice in Richard III

2020 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-20
Author(s):  
Richard Ashby
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Way

This article proposes a presentist reading of Richard III, a play that can be used to reflect on – and critique – our perversely post-truth historical moment. While the powerful distort the past for political purposes, the play dramatises the way abiding truths about history are nevertheless passed down through time by a popular culture of oral tradition. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, I also relate a timeless, oral tradition to proverbial wisdoms and to the concept of redemptive, Messianic time.

scholarly journals The Lingering Effects of Copyright’s Response to the Invention of Photography

2004 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Haight Farley
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Law And Technology ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Face ◽  
Lasting Impression ◽  
Historical Moment

In 1884, the Supreme Court was presented with dichotomous views of photography. In one view, the photograph was an original, intellectual conception of the author—a fine art. In the other, it was the mere product of the soulless labor of the machine. Much was at stake in this dispute, including the booming market in photographs and the constitutional importance of the originality requirement in copyright law. This first confrontation between copyright law and technology provides invaluable insights into copyright law’s ability to adapt and accommodate in the face of a challenge. An examination of these historical debates about photography across the domains of law, art, commerce and technology, the social sciences, and popular culture suggests that the particular contours of the author that continue to pose problems—particularly its predilection for creation over selection—can be located and attributed to this historical moment. The “author” took a particular shape in response to historically specific constraints, and the resulting doctrine has left a lasting impression on the way we read photography today.

Ideas and Leaders in Contentious Politics: One Parish Priest in El Salvador's Popular Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (01) ◽  
pp. 76-101
Author(s):  
PETER M. SANCHEZ
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
El Salvador ◽  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Parish Priest ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Resource Mobilisation ◽  
The Church

AbstractThis paper examines the actions of one Salvadorean priest – Padre David Rodríguez – in one parish – Tecoluca – to underscore the importance of religious leadership in the rise of El Salvador's contentious political movement that began in the early 1970s, when the guerrilla organisations were only just beginning to develop. Catholic leaders became engaged in promoting contentious politics, however, only after the Church had experienced an ideological conversion, commonly referred to as liberation theology. A focus on one priest, in one parish, allows for generalisation, since scores of priests, nuns and lay workers in El Salvador followed the same injustice frame and tactics that generated extensive political mobilisation throughout the country. While structural conditions, collective action and resource mobilisation are undoubtedly necessary, the case of religious leaders in El Salvador suggests that ideas and leadership are of vital importance for the rise of contentious politics at a particular historical moment.

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