“Age of Ethos”: Exploring Rhetorical Practices in Early Chinese Society

The essay explores the notion of collective ethos by looking closely at some of the key aspects of rhetorical and discourse practices in early Chinese society, such as ethos-as-spirit, the oneness of ethos/logos, and wei-yi (威仪; authority and deportment) among others, with a conclusion about the ethocentric nature of the traditional Chinese discourse system, rhetoric and philosophy included. To put things in perspective, it also discusses Western theories on ethos, including those by noted postmodernist theorists such as Bourdieu and Foucault. However, it does not argue that the Chinese tradition is the right path to rhetoric in general and ethos in particular but, rather, points out that rhetoric varies across cultures for an array of reasons, hence the necessity of approaching and understanding ethos differently from the model formulated by Aristotle.

Ethos in Early Chinese Rhetoric: The Case of “Heaven”

Though applicable in many Western historical-cultural settings, the Aristotelian model of ethos is not universal. As early Chinese rhetoric shows in the example of cheng-yan or “ethos of sincereness,” inspiring trust does not necessarily involve a process of character-based self-projection. In the Aristotelian model, the rhetor stands as a signifier of ethos, with an ideology of individualism privileged, whereas Chinese rhetoric assumes a collectivist model in which ethos belongs, not to an individual or a text, but rather to culture and cultural tradition. This essay will be concentrating on the concept of Heaven, central to the cultural and institutional systems of early Chinese society, in an attempt to explore collective ethos as a function of cultural heritage. Heaven, it shall be argued, plays a key role in the creation of Chinese ethos. This essay will also contrast the logocentrism of Western rhetorical tradition with the ethnocentrism of Chinese tradition. The significance of Heaven in its role as a defining attribute of Chinese ethos is reflective of a unique cultural heritage shaped by a collective human desire in seeking a consciousness of unity with the universe. Just as there are historical, cultural, and philosophical reasons behind logocentrism in the West, so the ethnocentric turn of Chinese rhetoric should be appreciated in light of a cultural tradition that carries its own historical complexities and philosophical intricacies.

Rupture and Call: Famine Encounters from Contemporary Irish and Ukrainian Women in the Arts

In this paper, the authors examine artistic engagement with famine memory by six women artists working in the Irish and Ukrainian contexts: Alanna O’Kelly, Paula Meehan, Mary McIntyre, Oksana Zabuzhko, Nataliia Vorozhbyt, and Lydia Bodnar-Balahutrak. Representing famine in artistic form is mired in ethical challenges. When interpreted at the level of national narratives, such histories can become identities and form a part of the collective ethos. Work by women artists is critically positioned to challenge the strong association between the feminine and the nation found in nationalistic discourses in both Ireland and Ukraine. The artists examined here work across genre and media, yet all eschew stereotypical imagery and prescribed vocabulary for representing famine, thus engaging in the complexities such representation offers. Framing their analysis with Bracha Ettinger’s concept of aesthetic wit(h)nessing, the authors find in the work of contemporary female artists in Ireland and Ukraine opportunities to encounter and grapple with famine memory without immediate recourse to commemoration or resolution. It is thus in the work of women artists today that one finds both a rupture and a call: a rupture to representing famine memory in modes that promote ownership and invite appropriation, and a call to consider what practices, rituals, and acts of wit(h)nessing have sustained life and remembered the dead after famine.

Surrealism's Homophobia

The primary document of Surrealist homophobia is a transcript, published in 1928 in the magazine La Révolution surréaliste, entitled “Research on Sexuality/ Extent of Objectivity, Individual Determinations, Degree of Consciousness.” The text records the first two of twelve closed, mostly men-only meetings, held in Paris between 1928 and 1932 by members and fellow travelers of the Surrealist group, at which the participants, according to the collective ethos of Surrealist practice, discussed their sexual preferences, experiences, and beliefs. In the published sessions, the group's leader, André Breton, who convened the meetings and edited the transcript, repeatedly denounced male homosexuality. The problematics of these repudiations are the topics of this article, the intention of which is to map the historical conditions of Breton's heteronormativity and to outline the latter's function in his theory of Surrealism. To this end, the essay displaces the psychoanalytic emphasis customary in Surrealism's reception in order to locate the movement in the historical discourse of sexuality. In the French culture wars of the 1920s, Surrealism mobilized a sexual negativity against the mainstream. Yet in certain key respects, Breton's thought preserved a heterosexist logic of conjugality. Ultimately, a historical reading of Surrealism's homophobia indicates the family ties between dialectical idealism and heteronormativity.

Reflexive Qualitative Research

Reflexivity can be regarded as part of a continuous research practice. Qualitative researchers work within and across social differences (e.g., cultural, class, race, gender, generation) and this requires them to navigate different layers of self-awareness—from unconscious to semiconscious to fully conscious. Because researchers can be aware on one level but not on others, reflexivity is facilitated by using an eclectic and expansive toolkit for examining the role of the researcher, researcher-researched relationships, power, privilege, emotions, positionalities, and different ways of seeing. Over the past fifty years, there has been a progression of reflexive practice as well as disciplinary debates about how much self-awareness and transparency are enough and how much is too much. The shift can be traced from the early practitioners of ethnography who did not reflect on their positions, power or feelings (or at least make these reflections public), to those who acknowledged that their emotions could be both revealing and distorting, to those who interrogated their multiple positionalities (mostly in terms of the blinders of Western/race/class/gender/generation), to those calling for the mixing and blurring of different genres of representation as important tools of reflexivity. Reflexivity is not a solitary process limited to critical self-awareness, but derives from a collective ethos and humanizes rather than objectifies research relationships and the knowledge that is created.

11. The regulatory framework for bank culture and conduct

This chapter focuses on the regulatory framework for bank culture and conduct. Bank culture profoundly affects the outcomes that regulators are concerned with: the prudential safety of banks and banksʼ conduct in the marketplace. Such culture is forged by individual decision-making and behaviour at banks, as well as the collective ethos and environment at the organisation. The regulation of individuals comprises of two regimes, a more stringent one for ‘senior managers’ as compared to ‘certified persons’. Senior managers and certified persons are approved according to fitness and propriety criteria, and their approval can be revoked for failing to meet these criteria on a continuing basis. They are also subject to an individual code of conduct and can be personally liable, subject to fines and/or full or partial prohibition from working in the financial sector. The chapter then looks at the development of soft law in banking culture and ethics.

Satire, humour and parody in 21st Century Nigerian women’s poetry

21st century Nigerian women poets have continued to utilise the aesthetics of literary devices as linguistic and literary strategies to project feminist privations and values in their creative oeuvres. There has been marginal interest towards 21st century Nigerian women’s poetry and their deployment of artistic devices such as satire, humour and parody. Unequivocally, such linguistic and literary devices in imaginative works are deployed as centripetal force to criticise amidst laughter, the ills of female devaluation in the society. The major thrust of the study, therefore, is to examine how satire, humour and parody are deployed in selected Nigerian women’s poetry to reproach and etch the collective ethos of women’s experience in contemporary Nigerian society. The study utilises qualitative analytical approach in the close reading and textual analysis of the selected texts focusing mainly on the aesthetics of humour, satire and parody in challenging male chauvinism in contemporary Nigerian women’s poetry. Three long poems: “Nuptial Counsel”, “Sadiku’s Song” and “The Sweet, Sweet Mistress’ Tale” by Mabel Evweirhoma and Maria Ajima respectively were purposively selected. The choice of the selected poems hinges on the artistic vigour, especially the evoking of laughter, mockery and condemnation of hegemonic strictures through the use of satire, humour and parody. The paper employs Molara Ogundipe’s Stiwanism, an aspect of Feminist theory in the analysis of the selected poems. The poets have shown the interventions of humour, satire and parody as linguistic devices in condemning and highlighting peculiarities of women peonage in Nigeria.

Walls

This chapter offers philosophical reflections on the nature of commodities and their value in our civilization, focusing on the particular site where a commodity becomes recognizable as itself: the walls in our cities. It begins with a discussion of stones and the city as a “thing of stone”, arguing that stone inscriptions are the first tangible—and certainly the longest lasting—incarnation of what modern political philosophy has called the public sphere. It also asserts that the images, faces, and words that comprise this spatialized symbolic order express the city's collective ethos and goes on to explain how advertising enables us to encounter the commodity in the political space where the city has always articulated and portrayed its own ethos. The chapter concludes by suggesting that city walls imply a morality that in turn provides an important clue about the shape of the world we live in.