Afterword

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Fojas
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Coercive Power ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Great Gatsby ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Great Gatsby ◽  
The Many

Postcrisis U.S. popular culture generated stories that put the capitalist social order in question by engaging the dialectics of personhood and dehumanization, normativity and deviance, freedom and imprisonment, and mobility and stasis. Many of these stories merely revise capitalism and reignite its appeal, offering outcomes that promise renewal and a return to financial and moral stability. Even the Great Gatsby returns after the Great Recession as a permutation of the many cautionary narratives about overweening economic ambition leading to inevitable failure and ruin. These postcrisis stories also contain moments of liberation from the coercive power of capitalism--moments that, if drawn together, might create an entirely new way of imagining the social order and, perhaps, encourage fantasies of liberation that might lead to their realization.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Fojas
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Sexual Deviance ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
The Great Recession

The story of U.S. power is revised after the economic crisis, creating an entirely new story form that begins, not with decline, but with an exhilarating freefall and ends with new ways of revitalizing white America. The postcrisis stories of class descent, sexual deviance, racial oppression, ruination, and disaster explore the contradictions and tensions exposed by the economic freefall. Popular culture of the Great Recession contributes to a social order shaped by economic precariousness and generates stories that encourage and enable publics to adapt to this new condition. These stories must not cross a certain threshold, one that would lead to insurrection. Perhaps all it takes is a little nudge to push these stories over the line, to reinterpret them and reframe their revolutionary and liberatory potential.

Metaphysical Exile

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Pippin
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Detailed Interpretation ◽  
The Many ◽  
Psychological Dimensions ◽  
Late Modern

This is the first detailed interpretation of J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” trilogy as a whole. Robert Pippin treats the three “fictions” as a philosophical fable, in the tradition of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Rousseau’s Emile, or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place, and they have all had most of the memories of their homeland “erased.” While also discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of spiritual homelessness, a version that characterizes late modern life itself, and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge. So, the state of exile is interpreted as “metaphysical” as well as geographical. In the course of an interpretation of the central narrative about a young boy’s education, Pippin shows how a number of issues arise, are discussed and lived out by the characters, all in ways that also suggest the limitations of traditional philosophical treatments of themes like eros, beauty, social order, art, family, non-discursive forms of intelligibility, self-deception, and death. Pippin also offers an interpretation of the references to Jesus in the titles, and he traces and interprets the extensive inter-textuality of the fictions, the many references to the Christian Bible, Plato, Cervantes, Goethe, Kleist, Wittgenstein, and others. Throughout, the attempt is to show how the literary form of Coetzee’s fictions ought to be considered, just as literary—a form of philosophical reflection.

‘I’ve Learned to Love What’s Going to Pay Me’: A Culture of Despair in Higher Education during a Time of Insecurity

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
University Employees ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Structural Problems ◽  
The Social ◽  
Commuter University ◽  
The One ◽  
College Plans

Based on 153 interviews at a mid-sized, commuter university, this article examines the disjuncture between students and alumni on the one hand, and faculty, academic staff and administrators on the other in their perceptions of the challenges facing students who graduate during the Great Recession. Findings reveal a culture of despair in response to economic insecurity for students and graduates: they pursued degrees primarily for a workplace credential, were fearful about the future, and experienced and expressed uncertainty in their post-college plans. While university employees were sympathetic to student problems, only a small number of faculty, staff and administrators viewed student despair as resulting from large-scale structural problems. Instead, the majority of faculty and all of the administrators and academic staff emphasized the need for an individualized response to the social problem of the Great Recession.

scholarly journals On Booze: a representation of The Roaring Twenties in the great Gatsby

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-164
Author(s):  
Jenison Alisson dos Santos ◽  
Caio Antônio de Medeiros Nóbrega Nunes Gomes ◽  
Elisa Mariana de Medeiros Nóbrega
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
Great Gatsby ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Great Gatsby ◽  
American Author ◽  
Post War

Fitzgerald is considered by many to be the spokesperson of the 1920’s post-World War I, offering his readers a distinctive look into the Golden Age of the U.S.A.. This article focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The great Gatsby (2001) and its representation and criticism of the historical context in which author and novel are inserted: the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties of the United States of America. For this purpose, our critical framework is based on Bloom’s (2006) and Heise’s (2001) studies on the subject, targeting a pertinent dialogue with Fitzgerald’ s work. As a result of our articulation between the critical framework and the corpus, we were able to recognize how the American author managed to express in his work a keen perception of the social conventions and the morals of the Jazz Age, of both the overt (the parties and the ostentation) and the covert aspects (the emptiness of that society and the unspoken post-war dread) of his time.

scholarly journals Review of Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip N. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Moment

The questions Marianne Cooper asks are relevant beyondthe context of the Great Recession – the event that headlines her analysis – but the crisis of the moment underscores their importance: How do people (women, men, families) increasingly charged with managing their owneconomic security experience and handle that task, emotionally? And further, what do the social class differences in that process tell us about life in an era of ballooning economic inequality?

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