Of Dust and Dollars

Author(s):  
Jeroen Dera

This chapter explores the self-branding of the contemporary Dutch poet Ellen Deckwitz. Explicitly referring to herself as ‘the product Ellen Deckwitz’, this author uniquely defines her career as a poet in terms of branding. The chapter provides a vivisection of this self-proclaimed ‘product’ through an in-depth postural analysis. It shows how Deckwitz creates the posture of an authoritative yet relatable poetry-entrepreneur who considers herself to be the flag-bearer of the younger generation, a rhetorical strategy that enables her to blend economic and symbolic capital. This, in turn, makes it possible for Deckwitz to cater to both a highbrow and a mass audience, by effectively resisting the widespread clichés evoked by the term ‘poetry’.

Author(s):  
Xaydarova Shaxlo Narzullaevna ◽  

The article emphasizes that the social adaptation of orphans and their preparation for family life is one of the most important tasks of the state and society. Today, much attention is paid to the self-realization of the younger generation, its harmonious development in all respects. The fact that a nation perceives itself as a result of such created conditions gives it confidence and gives it a reason to look to a promising future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-170
Author(s):  
Madeline Bourque Kearin

Abstract Sir Alexander Morison’s Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (1838) was created as a didactic tool for physicians, depicting lunatics in both the active and dormant states of disease. Through the act of juxtaposition, Morison constituted his subjects as their own Jekylls and Hydes, capable of radical transformation. In doing so, he marshaled artistic and clinical, visual and textual approaches in order to pose a particular argument about madness as a temporally manifested, visually distinguishable state defined by its contrast with reason. This argument served a crucial function in legitimizing the emergent discipline of psychiatry by applying biomedical methodologies to the observation and classification of distinctly physical symptoms. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “quintessentially Victorian parable” serves as a metaphor for the way 19th-century alienists conceptualized insanity, while the theme of duality at the core of Stevenson’s story serves as a framework for conceptualizing both psychiatry and the subjects it generates. It was (and is) a discipline formulated around narrative as the primary organizing structure for its particular set of paradoxes, and specifically, narratives of the self as a fluid, dynamic, and contradictory entity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Dynel ◽  
Fabio I. M. Poppi

Abstract This paper reports the findings of a study on the mechanics of insult-retort adjacency pairs in Twitter interactions. The analysis concerns primarily the humorous retorts made by the pornographic entrepreneur Stormy Daniels, who has been pelted with politically-loaded misogynist insults, many of which qualify as slut-shaming. These acts of verbal aggression are the result of her involvement in a legal dispute with President Donald Trump and his former attorney. Based on a carefully collected corpus of public exchanges of tweets, our qualitative analysis achieves a few goals. First, it brings to focus a previously ignored function of witty and creative humour, including the self-deprecating variety, as a powerful rhetorical strategy that helps address insults with dignity and that displays the speaker’s intellectual superiority over the attacker and a good sense of humour, as evidenced by multiple users’ positive metapragmatic evaluations of Stormy Daniels’s retorts. Second, these findings carry vital practical implications for handling misogynist comments, including slut-shaming, online. Third, this study offers new insights into the workings of insults and retorts thereto, not only in multi-party interactions on social media, specifically on Twitter, but also through traditional channels of communication.


Pragmatics ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 251-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayman Nazzal

In this study, I set out to investigate the motivations and reasons which induce Muslims to invoke the recitation of Qur’anic verses in their ordinary discourse. Based on the analysis of the data complied, Muslims seem inclined to recite Qur’anic verses for a host of pragmatic functions. These pragmatic functions range from mitigating one’s commitment for carrying out a future action or failing to honor one’s commitment, to avoiding the effects and adverse consequences of one’s actions on others. In addition, the recitation appears to function as a confirmation of the participants’ religious, cultural, and linguistic identities. Furthermore, the findings of this study underlie the multifaceted functions that Muslims attach to and associate with use of Qur’anic verses. Muslims can exonerate themselves from the responsibilities of rejecting directives or turning down offers or avoiding staking the self-image of their recipient particularly when their actions are face-threatening or have undesirable consequences on their recipients. Moreover, the findings of this study reveal that Muslims are inclined to use Qur’anic verses as a rhetorical strategy of indirect persuasion to lend credibility to the claims they wish their prospective audiences to act upon them.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Senni Jyrkiäinen

Social media and Facebook in particular have become an important arena of social interaction and premarital romance in Egypt. In a society where dating can potentially harm the reputation of young women, a decent public image is considered valuable symbolic capital. This is especially true for brides-to-be. Many university-educated young women have found Facebook useful for impression management. It is necessary for them to mask aspects of their behavior that may be condemned as morally inappropriate and they have thus developed strategies for navigating through certain moral expectations about female sexual purity, virginity and modesty. I define the young women who edit their profiles in order to conform to the prevailing norms of decency, in Goffman’s terms, as ‘cynical performers’. As I show, the embellishment of the self is a pragmatic solution to the problem of coping with existing dating practices and conflicting norms of proper gender interaction, often understood as ‘Islamic’.


Co-herencia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (32) ◽  
pp. 159-178
Author(s):  
Christopher Tindale

The New Rhetoric identifies the self-deliberator as one of three main types of audience. But such a turn toward the self is at odds with studies of contemporary argumentation, particularly social argumentation. Argumentation takes place “out there”, modifying the environments in which audiences operate. Equally interesting is the use of self-deliberation as a rhetorical strategy. Arguing with oneself, especially when that self is distanced in some way from the individual involved, employs self-deliberation beyond the ends that Perelman assigned to it. In this paper, my goal is to explore the nature of the self-deliberator as an audience and self-deliberation as a rhetorical strategy employed in argumentation.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoni Gonzalo Carbó

Resumen: El presente artículo es un análisis comparado de la experiencia visionaria del rojo de la sangre y las rosas vinculada a la presencia del ángel en la mística (Rūzbihān Baqlī), la poesía (Rilke) y el cine (Paradžanov) como expresión de la aniquilación de sí. Tanto el diarium spirituale de Rūzbihān, relato biográfico y hagiográfico extraordinario, como la filmografía de Paradžanov, llena de referencias simbólicas, entre otras, a la tradición persa y al Islam, y surcada, como el diario espiritual del místico persa, de experiencias visionarias extraordinarias, se muestran como elevadas obras de auto-revelación. Asimismo, en la escritura de Rilke, que al igual que Dante, era un vidente y aspiraba a ser un iniciado, el ángel constituye, como es sabido, una figura simbólica capital. En sus estancias en Madrid y Toledo pudo admirar la obra de El Greco fijando su mirada en la epifanía de la sangre y las rosas. Concluimos que Rūzbihān, El Greco, Rilke y Paradžanov comparten una visión similar del color rojo de la sangre y de las rosas como experiencia mística sacrificial en la que los ángeles son testigos activos. Como en las visiones de Juliana de Norwich, la sangre extendida constituye en todos estos casos una forma de desfiguración del cuerpo místico. Abstract: The present article is a comparative analysis of the visionary experience of the blood red and the roses linked to the presence of the angel in mysticism (Rūzbihān Baqlī), poetry (Rilke) and cinema (Paradžanov) as an expression of the annihilation of the self. Both Rūzbihān’s diarium spirituale, an extraordinary biographical and hagiographic account, and Paradžanov’s filmography, full of symbolic references, among others, to the Persian tradition and Islam, and furrowed, like the spiritual diary of the Persian mystic, of extraordinary visionary experiences, they are shown as high works of self-revelation. Likewise, in the writing of Rilke, who, like Dante, was a seer and aspired to be an initiate, the angel constitutes, as is well known, a symbolic capital figure. In his stays in Madrid and Toledo he could admire the work of El Greco, fixing his gaze on the epiphany of blood and roses. We conclude that Rūzbihān, El Greco, Rilke and Paradžanov share a similar vision of the red color of blood and roses as a sacrificial mystical experience in which angels are active witnesses. As in the visions of Julian of Norwich, the extended blood constitutes in all these cases a form of disfigurement of the mystical body.


Slavic Review ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 819-843 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Johnson

How did the Stalin Prize function in the Soviet fine art establishment of the 1940s and 1950s and how were the awards interpreted by members of the artistic community and the public? This examination of the discussions of the Stalin Prize Committee and unrehearsed responses to the awards reveals an institution that operated at the intersection of political and expert-artistic standards within which the parameters of postwar socialist realism were negotiated and to some extent defined. The Stalin Prize for the Fine Arts played an important part in the development of the leader cult and contributed to the self-aggrandizement of an elite minority. The symbolic capital of the Stalin Prize was compromised by its role, perceived or actual, in the consolidation of a generational and ideological hegemony within the Soviet art world and the establishment of an aesthetic blueprint for socialist realism.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidat

‘God is the Light of the heavens and the earth…’ This article sheds light on the modalities of authority that exist in a traditional religious seminary or Dar al-Uloom (hereon abbreviated to DU) in modern Britain. Based on unprecedented insider access and detailed ethnography, the paper considers how two groups of teachers, the senior and the younger generation, acquire and shine their authoritative light in unique ways. The article asserts that within the senior teachers an elect group of ‘luminaries’ exemplify a deep level of learning combined with practice and embodiment, while the remaining teachers are granted authority by virtue of the Prophetic light, or Hadith, they radiate. The younger generation of British-born teachers, however, are the torchbearers at the leading edge of directing the DU. While it may take time for them to acquire the social and symbolic capital of the senior teachers, operationally, they are the ones illuminating the way forward. The paper discusses the implications of the changing nature of authority within the DU is likely to have for Muslims in Britain.


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