Posverdad y destrucción del espacio público. Una lectura desde el pensamiento de Hannah Arendt

En 1967 y como respuesta a las críticas sobre sus reportajes del juicio en Jerusalén contra Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt publicó en las páginas de The New Yorker un ensayo titulado «Verdad y Política». Cuatro años después, y tras la filtración de los papeles del Pentágono, firmó en The New York Review of Books un ensayo hermano titulado «La mentira en la política». El presente artículo toma como punto de partida dichos trabajos para discutir la actualidad del pensamiento arendtiano en relación con el actual fenómeno de la posverdad. A través de una metodología histórico-hermenéutica fundamentada en una amplia revisión documental tanto de fuentes primarias como secundarias, el objetivo del presente artículo será analizar y valorar el concepto de defactualization, acuñado por la pensadora alemana con motivo de la publicación de los papeles del Pentágono para hacer referencia al enmascaramiento de la realidad, como un proto-concepto con el que Hannah Arendt ya nombró el fenómeno que hoy conocemos como posverdad, incluso antes de que el propio término apareciera. Partiendo de esa base, se examinan tres características que se encuentran tanto en las reflexiones de la pensadora alemana durante el pasado siglo como en las investigaciones actuales en torno a la posverdad: la irrelevancia de la verdad factual, la pérdida de confianza de los ciudadanos en la política, y la destrucción de la esfera pública; una ruptura del necesario espacio público de debate político, de contraste de ideas y de generación de acuerdos y consensos como consecuencia de todo lo anterior.

“As Truthful as Our Notion of the Past Can Ever Be”:

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Alice Munro drew attention in interviews to her rapt admiration for the work of William Maxwell, a writer she has called “my favorite writer in the world.” The two were not close, although they met a few times through their shared association with the New Yorker. In 1988 Munro published an appreciation of Maxwell’s work and, after his death in 2000, agreed to revise it for a tribute volume published in 2004. During those years too, Munro was at work on a family volume she had long contemplated, The View from Castle Rock (2006), one that was inspired in part by and modelled on Maxwell’s Ancestors: A Family History (1971). This article examines the Maxwell-Munro crux as an example of the dynamics of authorship; it is an important example of two compatible writers who, throughout their careers, created narrative rooted in the very stuff of their own experience in place and time—whether seen as fiction, autobiography, or memoir. Each did so in ways that accentuate, for the critic intent on analysing authorship, the play of the past in shaping of any narrative.

POSTIMPERIALNI PATRIARHAT IN KARNEVALESKNA PERIFERIJA: MELANIA TRUMP V TRANSNACIONALNI JAVNOSTI

Povzetek. Članek obravnava recepcijo prve dame Melanie Trump v ameriškem in slovenskem javnem prostoru. Analiza v prvem delu temelji na razčlenitvi medijskih upodobitev v reviji The New Yorker. V drugem delu se ukvarja z odzivi v slovenski javnosti s posebnim poudarkom na dveh spletnih portalih (siol.si in delo. si). Temeljna ugotovitev primerjave je, da v ameriškem kontekstu prevladuje distribuiranje medijskih podob Melanie Trump kot naturalizirane prve dame s koreninami na socialističnem Vzhodu. V slovenskem prostoru je dejstvo etnične pripadnosti predmet prisvajanja v nacionalno fantazijo, ki, nasprotno, utrjuje predstavo o razvezi s socialistično preteklostjo, pri čemer pa se, kot pokaže primer postavitve kipa v rojstni Sevnici, kažejo tudi poskusi destabiliziranja dihotomije center-periferija. Študija si na podlagi teh dvoumnih odzivov zastavlja raziskovalno vprašanje usode simbolnega materinstva v dobi transnacionalizacije sodobnih družb. Ključni pojmi: Melania Trump, prva dama, postsocializem, nacionalizem, spol, Vzhod

Importancia de la portada del New Yorker para interpretar la crisis del Covid19

Presentamos un trabajo de investigación empírico donde analizamos el uso de la ilustración en un medio concreto (The New Yorker) para contrastar el poder de transmisión del mensaje en un contexto muy concreto como es el de la pandemia mundial debido a la propagación de la covid-19. Metodología: Se ha llevado a acabo una triangulación metodológica combinando diversas técnicas y herramientas como la investigación documental, análisis descriptivo, focus group y análisis de contenido . Resultados: El análisis de 347 portadas revela que el elemento que varía de una publicación a otra es la ilustración.

Constitution Illustrated

Fans of comics and cartoons will revel in the creative deployment of characters from the funny pages throughout Constitution Illustrated. Artist R. Sikoryak is a contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review and is the author of several illustrated books. In his latest work, he has concocted an ingenious ploy to enliven the text of the Constitution. Each page features a different section of the Constitution being recited by cartoon characters. Sikoryak has imitated the style and borrowed the characters of dozens of cartoonists. Readers will find favorites both classic and contemporary, from Bud Counihan’s Betty Boop and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy to Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. Aficionados will have fun figuring out the artist being imitated on each page, and a helpful index provides a key to the source of each drawing for those who aren’t able to recognize the myriad cartoonists represented.

Literary Reviewing and the Velocity of Book Histories in Times of Digitization

Web 2.0 has enabled a wide variety of practices and processes involved in the production, dissemination and reception of literary works to take place in an interactive environment. Concepts of authorship, the book as such, but also literary reviewing have undergone significant changes as a result, leading, for example, to the rise of the amateur critic. The case of Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” (2017), published both in print and online by The New Yorker magazine, and its “going viral”, illustrate the speed and alacrity with which literary works today undergo evaluation and how different these kinds of discursive practices are in comparison to more traditional notions of literary reviewing. In the light of this velocity of reception processes, this article re-examines existing theories of literary value and evaluation (as in the form of reviewing and as postulated, e. g., by Barbara Herrnstein Smith) and their relation to book history.

Are You Being Sirred? Work in Progress, Nanette, Douglas, and the New Butch Middlebrow

Abby McEnany’s new comedy series Work in Progress (Showtime) and Hannah Gadsby’s recent standup specials Nanette and Douglas (Netflix) evoke “butch middlebrow,” a contemporary aesthetic and affective sensibility distinguished by the cozy reception it enjoys among straight, white, liberal viewers and critics. McEnany’s and Gadsby’s works have occasioned praise from cosmopolitan gatekeepers like the New York Times and the New Yorker for their self-aware brands of comedy rooted in unvarnished portrayals of butch trauma. Critics ritually insist on the implausibility of Gadsby’s and McEnany’s success, but the popularity of these queer creators’ offerings is not as unlikely as so often presumed. Indeed, the middlebrow butch’s alleged improbability does not render her cultural accolades improbable; it may even ensure them, allowing a new canon of butch respectability to emerge in the light shed by the beacons of aspirational culture.

The True-Based Narrative

In 1946, John Hersey, an employee of The New Yorker magazine, proposed the reality of the bomb that was thrown into Hiroshima for the agenda, and interviewed six coincidental survivors in the area and published the records within the frame of a truth-based narrative form. This work, which may be considered as a product of ‘literary journalism' or a reflection of ‘transmedia' or a ‘cross-media', is a true-based narrative in which six survivors' dramatic lives are constructed and embedded successfully. The study aims to describe and analyze the narrative structures in which the author tries to influence people in Hiroshima book, and the relationship between these structures will be tried to be revealed through narrative analysis, and a certain contribution to the narrative literature is targeted as well.

Remembering Walter Bernstein

Screenwriter Howard Rodman offers a poignant appreciation of Walter Bernstein, the blacklisted screenwriter and director who died in January 2021 at the age of 101. Bernstein had been a fixture in Rodman’s life since the 1950s, when Rodman’s father served as a “front” for Bernstein’s television work. Bernstein would later use that experience as inspiration for The Front (dir. Martin Ritt, 1977), his trenchant and mordantly funny account of life on the blacklist. Rodman surveys Bernstein’s long career, from his years as a journalist for the US Army publication Yank and The New Yorker, to his post-blacklist work of the 1960s and 1970s, to his work at the Sundance Screenwriting Lab, where he and Rodman both served as advisors, closing the circle.