“Genre”: A nomadic concept or an aesthetic universal?

The article raises the problem of the metadisciplinary interpretation of the term “genre”, which can be equally well defined as a nomadic concept or as an artistic universal. The author focuses on the question of the configuration of features defining the concept of genre in philology, art history, and musicology. Taking as a basis the general aesthetic principles of genre specification – functional, thematic, and structural – the author analyzes their genre-forming potential in various artistic forms and comes to the conclusion that understanding genre as a communicative and formally meaningful category provides an interdisciplinary dialogue, but at the same time, genre dominants can be different. For speech genres, such a dominant is a communicative goal, for painting genres – a subject content. The semantic parameter of the genre is interpreted in a similar way in literary criticism and musicology. The division into primary and secondary genres is a common feature for both philology and musicology. The structural parameter includes compositional features and elements of genre style, and the specific weight of this parameter is especially high in canonical (protoliterary and literary) and primary musical genres. The meaning of the structural features of the genre is inversely proportional to the visualization of an artistic form. This parameter is least significant for the genre identification of a painting.

Several Theses in Support of an Integrative Understanding of the Administrative Process

An Author’s approach to substantiating the concept of an integrative understanding of the administrative process as a combination of two components is proposed: the executive administrative process and the judicial administrative process. The approaches that have developed in domestic legal science are refuted, according to which the legal process can take place only in the administration of justice, only in the resolution of disputes and in the presence of at least two disputing parties, and the administrative process is identified with administrative proceedings. Based on the interpretation of the norms of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the article shows that each of the three branches of state power: legislative, executive and judicial, has its own procedural form of functioning. Such a procedural form of exercising executive power, according to the Author, is an extrajudicial (executive) administrative process. Examples are given that show the existence of a common algorithm for resolving administrative cases by both administrative-public bodies and courts, which indicates a single procedural nature of the corresponding types of judicial and extrajudicial activities and the absence of fundamental differences between them. The conclusion is substantiated that the legal enforcement process is the activity of the competent authorities to resolve any categories of individual legal cases, and the legal procedural procedure is the procedure for carrying out such activities, in connection with which they are related to each other as content and form. The Author concludes that the law enforcement process carried out by public administrative bodies, both positive and jurisdictional, can be characterized as an administrative process and is not, in contrast to administrative proceedings, a kind of administrative procedure. Administrative proceedings are considered as a meaningful category of executive administrative process, namely, as an activity for the consistent, stage-by-stage resolution of an administrative case. The close relationship and interdependence of executive and judicial administrative processes are shown, the presence of which indicates that these two types of process are constituent parts of a single whole - the administrative process as a general procedural category, in connection with which it is possible to properly construct and systematize the administrative procedural legislation of the Russian Federation.

Not Even Close to a (Fair) Fight: Technology and the Future of War

The exponential expansion and advancement of wartime technology has the potential to wipe out ‘war’ as a meaningful category. Assuming that the creation of new wartime technologies continues to accelerate, it could soon be the case that there will no longer be wars, but rather mass killings, slaughters, or genocides. This is because the concept of ‘war’ entails that opposing sides either will, or are able to, fight back against one another to some recognizable degree. In fact, this is one of the differences between war and wholesale killing, slaughter, or genocide. With the asymmetric proliferation of killing and maiming wartime technologies, there may soon no longer be even the possibility of a fair, or somewhat fair, fight; there will only be scorched earth.

Unstable constellations: Recognizing cinema out of place

The transition to digital has exacerbated the fragility of existing definitions of cinema. This chapter lays out the working definitions that will be used throughout the rest of the book, offering a way beyond medium specificity that still recognizes cinema as a meaningful category. Taking elements from apparatus theory, in a materialist rather than metaphysical sense, the chapter describes cinema as a contingent alignment of space and practice, both a physical configuration and a social protocol. The chapter contrasts the perspectives of several authors, including Elsaesser, Gaudreault, Friedberg, Casetti, Bellour, and Gitelman, to arrive at ten elements that can be assembled flexibly into something recognizable as cinema. This lays the groundwork for the empirical case studies in the chapters that follow.

Conclusion

After recapitulating the arguments of the book, the conclusion asks what in what way this book’s claims might be salient for a larger anthropological discussion of religion? It argues that religion’s unfixed and open nature, the very traits that have caused some to question whether religion is an intelligible comparative category, is actually what informs religion as a meaningful category. It argues that the absent nature of the more than human beings and forces that stand at religion’s heart allows it to take up a plurality of different forms of materiality, and that this wealth of different materialities allows religion to operate in effect as a fly-wheel for other social-cultural processes and assemblages, accelerating, decelerating, or mutating other processes to an unmatched degree.

My Little Girl Wife

By the later nineteenth century, ideas about childhood and about marriage had undergone significant transformations in the United States, especially among the middle class. Children were now seen as innocents in need of protection and marriage was meant to be a complementary (if still unequal) union of two companionate souls. Both of these trends meant that child marriage increasingly came into disfavor. Focusing on depictions of child marriage in newspapers, debates about statutory rape laws, and marriage and divorce reform leagues, this chapter documents succesful efforts to raise the age of consent to marriage. It also shows the ways that working-class parents, generally those least likely to identify age as a meaningful category of identity, used these new laws to prevent their minor children from marrying.

Judaism and Heterogeneity in the Modernist Long Novel

This paper explores how Judaism is represented in non-Jewish writers of the nineteenth-century (outstandingly, Walter Scott and George Eliot) and in modernist long novels, such as those by Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Alfred Döblin, Robert Musil, and Thomas Mann, and, in the Latin American novel, Carlos Fuentes and Roberto Bolaño. It finds a relationship between the length of the ‘long’ novel, as a meaningful category in itself (not to be absorbed into other modernist narratives), and the interest that these novels have in Judaism, and in anti-semitism (e.g. in the Dreyfus affair) as something which cannot be easily assimilated into the narratives which the writers mentioned are interested in. The paper investigates the implications of this claim for reading these texts.

Culture and complexity through English as a lingua franca: rethinking competences and pedagogy in ELT

English as a lingua franca (ELF) research highlights the complexity and fluidity of culture in intercultural communication through English. ELF users draw on, construct, and move between global, national, and local orientations towards cultural characterisations. Thus, the relationship between language and culture is best approached as situated and emergent. However, this has challenged previous representations of culture, particularly those centred predominantly on nation states, which are prevalent in English language teaching (ELT) practices and the associated conceptions of communicative and intercultural communicative competence. Two key questions which are then brought to the fore are: how are we to best understand such multifarious characterisations of culture in intercultural communication through ELF and what implications, if any, does this have for ELT and the teaching of culture in language teaching? In relation to the first question, this paper will discuss how complexity theory offers a framework for understanding culture as a constantly changing but nonetheless meaningful category in ELF research, whilst avoiding essentialism and reductionism. This underpins the response to the second question, whereby any formulations of intercultural competence offered as an aim in language pedagogy must also eschew these simplistic and essentialist cultural characterisations. Furthermore, the manner of simplification prevalent in approaches to culture in the ELT language classroom will be critically questioned. It will be argued that such simplification easily leads into essentialist representations of language and culture in ELT and an over representation of “Anglophone cultures.” The paper will conclude with a number of suggestions and examples for how such complex understandings of culture and language through ELF can be meaningfully incorporated into pedagogic practice.