Boquitas Pintadas, de Manuel Puig: um romance experimental

Subcultural escapades via music consumption: Identity transformations and extraordinary experiences in Dionysian music subcultures

Critical pedagogical work hinges upon teachers’ critical consciousness about students’ identities that constitute ‘diversity’ and how they are situated within systems of oppression and privilege. In this study, survey data were collected from practicing world language teachers’ (WLTs) to explore their beliefs about the extent to which dimensions of students’ identities played a role in their language teaching practices. Additionally, these data captured their beliefs about the extent to which teachers, administrators, curriculum developers, and schools should be responsible for addressing identity dimensions, such as ethnoracial status, gender, socioeconomic status, and faith. Results from cluster analyses indicated that teachers’ orientations varied systematically: a first belief orientation locates neither teachers nor schools as responsible, and that student ‘diversity’ may be irrelevant to education; a second orientation locates both teachers and schools as having shared responsibility, but that some identities might be irrelevant to teaching and learning; a third orientation wherein teachers viewed some identity dimensions as more relevant to their teaching practices than others, suggesting that, although teachers may be critically conscious about identity, that consciousness may not translate to critical pedagogical practices; and a last orientation that suggests critically conscious language teachers who also endorse learner-centered teaching practices. Findings from this study illuminate new theoretical and conceptual spaces about WLTs’ sense of responsibility and advocacy for both students and the ways they position their classrooms as sites of critical pedagogies. These findings have implications for teacher leaders and teacher educators as they work to build teacher capacities for engaging in critical pedagogies that examine systems of oppression and privilege in language classrooms.

SUMMARY In the U.S. as young African-American men in urban areas mature, they face oppressive social forces as well as the normative developmental challenges of adolescence. Nonetheless, much of psychology focuses on personal rather than sociopolitical development. As a basis for interventions aimed at sociopolitical awareness and action, this article presents a theory of oppression and sociopolitical development based on the work of Serrano Garcia, Freire and others. According to this theory, critical consciousness (i.e., critical awareness about one's political, social and cultural condition) is an essential skill for sociopolitical development. This article also describes the “Young Warriors” program for building critical consciousness in high school aged young men. The results of this action-research project suggest that critical consciousness can be enhanced through a brief, eight-session intervention with the aid of Rap video, film and other products of mass culture.

Scholar Spotlight:Soraya Murray Interview by TreaAndrea M. Russworm Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Soraya Murray (Derek Conrad Murray, 2020). Soraya Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on contemporary visual culture with particular interest in art, film, and video games. An associate professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Murray's first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018), examines how post-9/ 11 era mainstream games mirror and are constitutive of larger societal fears, dreams, hopes, and even complex struggles for recognition. In recent years, her writings have focused on both methodological and ethical considerations of critical game studies as well as modeling intersectional approaches that consider race, gender, class, nation, and sociopolitical context. TreaAndrea M. Russworm: In relation to your work as a whole, how do you perceive the audience(s) for your work? Soraya Murray: I write for visual studies and cultural studies scholars and students, for those interested in mass media, and really for anyone who looks at video games—or, more generally, visual cultures of technology—and wants a humanistic [End Page 1] framework for understanding them. My work is a delivery device for theoretical consideration of the advanced technological culture in which we live today, refracted through approachable visual forms like films and video games. There is a persisting failure of the imagination regarding the futures we envision for ourselves and who belongs in them. I would describe what I'm doing as a project of inclusive reframing, of revisionist intervention, or an opening up of possibilities. Russworm: Can you say a little about your interests as a scholar and teacher and what brought you to study art and games? Murray: My interest in visual culture came from visiting museums all over the world, something my parents insisted on when we traveled. I was first socialized into advanced technology through my access to home console video games and later through grade school programs in Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) programming. Also, my parents met on a blind date at a party celebrating Neil Armstrong's first moon walk in 1969. Somehow my fate feels tied up in that utopian promise of the space race. In terms of pursuing academia, I always respected and venerated the educators in my life. As a kid, I used to beg to go to the bookstore, like other kids beg for the toy store. I was captivated by screens. I loved films that were extremely heady and, in retrospect, conventionally inappropriate for my age. The signs were there from the start, but it was a long and twisty path to find my way to academia as a profession. Some people seem to know from very early on exactly what they should be doing in life; I had to see past other people's expectations, to follow my instincts and proclivities. Russworm: Please reflect on what it means to you to play, study, and teach video games in a technical and cultural climate that has so often promoted racism, sexism, homophobia, and other discriminatory practices. Have these realities influenced your work or experiences with video games? Murray: The encoding of technology as the domain of white male genius has been manufactured in the US context over a long period of time and with concerted effort. These perceptions around who can be the authentic innovator and who is relegated to the consumer have been shored up in education, mass culture, and the workplace. The promotion of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other discriminatory practices is a sign of weakness in the industry, not strength. Being in Silicon Valley, I see that the constant flow of people who make these innovations possible is extremely diverse—it is literally like living in an international airport terminal. But this is quite discontinuous with the ideology and the public-facing image of innovation. Having a historical understanding of how these ideologies have come into being helps me to keep perspective that the friction that I may experience in the classroom or in professional circumstances is a by-product of long social programming...

Introduction. Cinema, toys, literature for children are not only the source of entertainment but also the most important tool for the formation of moral values. K.I. Chukovsky was convinced that films, cartoons and books should be the bearer of true spiritual wealth, and not the means to satisfy sinister interests and primitive needs. Modern children’s publishing, in contrast to the beliefs of the writer and the required standards imposed on it, is oversaturated with hidden deviations, which poses a particular danger to children. The purpose of our work is to continue the study of increasing hidden tendencies of destruction of children’s consciousness through the production of mass culture, which were long ago identified by K.I. Chukovsky in his critical works and are included in the basis of the current study of the problem.Materials and Methods. The basis of this study is the following methods: historical and literary, axiological, formal logic. The main material base was the works of K.I. Chukovsky: “Multi” (1940), “Corruption of children’s souls” (1948), “Corruption of American children” (1949), “Education of gangsters” (1949), works of domestic and foreign researchers of the phenomenon of mass culture.Results. American comics and the work of W. Disney as part of mass culture in the refraction of criticism of the writer are weapons of mass destruction: they morally decompose children, impose a hedonistic and anti-human way of life on them, oppose tradition, blur and neutralize the concepts of good/evil, light/darkness, norm/deviation in the children’s consciousness.Discussion and Conclusion. Critical works of K.I. Chukovsky clearly show that mass culture contains a risky potential that can decompose morality, form deviant spirituality, promote and implant any idea. Research on this issue allows us to respond in a timely manner and take the necessary actions in order to prevent tragic consequences in the issue of raising the younger generation. Especially now, when there is a merciless mental war against our children.

Le Petit Journal des Refusées:A Graphical Reading Johanna Drucker (bio) Gelett Burgess' witty 1896 San Francisco publication Le Petit Journal des Refusées provokes two important questions that make us think about how we understand the cultural role and aesthetic identity of certain modern works of innovative art. First, can we do a critical reading of a literary work through attention to its graphic properties? Second, can we talk about an aesthetic work as modern without either straining to align it with the utopian vision and politics of the nineteenth-century avant-garde or reading it only as a product of mass culture?1 In the case of Le Petit Journal, a study of its graphic characteristics leads us into analysis of a work whose innovative expression is situated within a middle-brow world, far from radical ideals except those of playful humor but wonderfully self-conscious about the scene on which it depends. My first encounter with this publication came long before I would have been able to frame the critical issues I address here. I spotted it on the desk of the then curator of the History Department at the Oakland Museum when I was an assistant to the Registrar.2 I had been hired for my typing skills, and such an encounter was as unlikely as it was life changing. Already actively immersed in a world of small press printers and experimental writers, I could recognize how unique a graphic work it was at a glance. The wallpaper cover, the trapezoidal shape, the strangely weird and wonderfully intriguing image on the front were so fascinating I could not keep myself from transgressing decorum and seizing the thing for examination. Questions immediately arose to drive my research. I wanted to know how this publication compared to its contemporary context and whether its graphic form was as unusual as it looked, or whether it borrowed and recycled graphic elements already in use. Returning to this after three decades, I can frame that original response in terms of critical considerations about experimental work and modern publications. Studies of modernism have suffered from two binarisms. The first critical formulation divided works of art from those of mass production.3 The various proponents of Frankfurt school and critical theory argued that the rarified aesthetics of esoteric fine art was a political tool to counter the mind-numbing, formulaic products of the culture industries.4 Since so many modern artists, especially in the twentieth century, are fascinated with mass [End Page 137] culture, practitioners of critical theory had to justify these acts of appropriation and media transformation. Theoretical language assigned a redemptive uplift, specifically, a quality of critique, to the act of bringing the dross of mass production across the line and into the realm of fine art but never allowed for the flow of ideas and values to praise mass cultural works.5 In the second binarism, cultural studies theorists condemned esoteric art as elitist and argued for the empowering effects of subculture audiences created through mass-culture artifacts.6 In these dreary struggles, the supporters of Brecht or Beckett do mortal combat with the fans of Stephen King and Star Wars (usually in academic realms far removed from any but the most symbolic political acts). But critical theorists and cultural studies proponents are united by their adherence to a larger principle: the myth of a utopian role for art or aesthetic experience as a politicizing force in culture. To argue otherwise, they suggest, is to fall into the camp of the neo-conservatives and align one's aspirations for fine art to either an Arnoldian notion of moral improvement, or abandon all moral responsibility and give over to mere hedonistic pleasure or rampant consumerist tactics.7 But between the pole of art as politics (whether through esoteric resistance, activist didacticism, interventionist strategies, or organizing principles) and that of art as product, lies an enormous terrain filled with works of fine art that were not and never could be considered utopian—but which are indisputably modern. This outline of critical positions is over-simplified, but is meant to point to the problem that arises immediately in trying to read a...

The criminal justice system constrains social workers’ ability to practice critical social work. Given the increased rates of re-entry from prison into disenfranchised, minority communities in the USA, knowledge about re-entry should be made available to social workers wishing to assist those who suffer from extreme marginalisation and oppression during re-entry. In this qualitative research study, we interviewed American male halfway house residents (N = 21) in the lead-up to their release about their perspectives on returning to their communities of origin, settling into other communities and meeting individuals from outside of their immediate social networks. Our results demonstrate that research participants anticipated experiencing social alienation in all three domains. Our discussion contextualises these findings within two dimensions of critical social work: critical consciousness and critical social policy.

Recent studies indicate that language teaching can utilize humorous mass culture texts (e.g. TV shows, advertisements, comics, magazine articles, songs, websites), so as to enable students to detect subtle social meanings and implicit cultural values (see, among others, Archakis et al., 2014; Μοrrell, 2002; Μοrrell, & Duncan-Andrade, 2005; Stamou, 2012; Tsami et al., 2014). This study aims to propose teaching activities involving critical interpretation of humorous TV advertisements in class. The activities are designed for pupils attending the 5th and 6th grade of Greek primary school (11-12 years old). The aim of these activities is to raise the pupils’ critical language awareness by revealing hidden and normalized language ideologies inherent in the representation of geographical varieties in such texts. Thus, our teaching proposal is intended to help students realize the linguistic inequalities reproduced in such texts, thus denaturalizing linguistic homogeneity (see, among others, Blackledge, 2005: 65-67). Enhancing the students’ critical language awareness is among the main goals of the multiliteracies model (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Κalantzis & Cope, 1999; Kalantzis et al., 2005; New London Group, 1999). This model aims to nurture the students’ communicative competence through the analysis of diverse genres in four stages: 1. Situated practice, utilizing texts provided by students, reflecting their sociocultural experiences; 2. Overt instruction, which helps students realize the linguistic and textual mechanisms used for the production and interpretation of texts; 3. Critical framing, referring to the critical interpretation of a text, based on the sociocultural context of its production; 4. Transformed practice that is reframing discourse and transferring meaning from one context to another, while producing a text. Following the multiliteracies model, this paper presents specific teaching activities to enable pupils achieve a critical interpretation of TV advertisements. Our proposal aims at helping students: 1. Identify geographical variation and dialectophones; 2. Become aware of dominant ideologies regarding geographical varieties, their mixing, and their speakers; 3. Stop associating dialectophones with specific social characteristics (e.g. profession, age, education, place of origin, ability to use language variations/ languages considered as “overt prestige” etc.); 4. Identify how non-standard varieties are denigrated and stigmatized in mass culture texts (e.g. through humor); 5. Become aware of hidden and naturalized ideologies expressed through the humorous representations of geographical variation on TV advertisements; 6. Realize the reasons for which geographical varieties are represented as humorous in mass culture texts. The above activities constitute part of a teaching material implemented in two public elementary schools in the prefecture of Achaia, Greece. According to the initial results, the pupils’ performance is enhanced both in terms of identifying geographical variation and humorous phrases and of interpreting the reasons for which geographical varieties are represented as humorous in mass culture texts.

The appearance of Bloomsbury’s New Modernisms series marks a turning point in the study of modernism, a moment at which its discoveries and insights can be productively evaluated and reflected upon. Bloomsbury’s series offers a range of introductions, guides, and handbooks—not manifestoes or polemics—to help students and scholars map the diverse perspectives and approaches that now make up the field. This dispassionate accounting of what has been accomplished in modernist studies over the past twenty or so years—in relation, of course, to the longer history of modernism itself—signals an important watershed: the “new” modernist studies is no longer primarily preoccupied with its own project of “making it new,” and is now a well-established field. Of course we might read Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s important 2008PMLA article, “The New Modernist Studies,” in a similar light—less a proclamation than a summary and assessment of the field as it stood at that time. That piece, written a decade ago, however, still performed the function of introducing an emergent field to scholars outside that field. Bloomsbury’s series, I would argue, represents a new era: an era in which the field itself has already coalesced and in which overview, summaries, and assessments no longer need also serve as introductions to an emerging field.“Well established” does not of course mean clearly defined or easy to describe: on the contrary, the field of modernist studies consists in large part of debates over how the field should be defined. On the one hand, recent attempts to rethink the term have made it harder than ever to pin down what “modernism” means, whether in stylistic, historical, or geographical terms. On the other hand, a residual sense of modernism seems to endure, so that most of us, as Justice Potter Stewart once said of pornography, know it when we see it: artworks from roughly the first half of the twentieth century that hit a range of familiar notes: stream of consciousness, opacity of form, manifestoes, the Men of 1914, the Women of the Left Bank, the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz age. This odd mix of overdetermined clichés on the one hand (think of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris) and open-ended, endlessly shifting and expanding categories on the other presents a challenge to anyone who wishes to understand what has actually been happening in modernist studies over the past few decades.And indeed, much has been happening: scholars have been redefining the field, expanding it along geographical, chronological, and stylistic axes and making space for different voices, methodologies, and critical perspectives. They have worked to create a much broader and more racially, sexually, economically, and politically inclusive canon. A more precise and accurate rendering of the field, were such a thing possible, would thus require redefining contested terms and peeling back layers of myth, legend, and ideology. It would also require reimagining a cultural phenomenon—modernism—whose original incarnation is still potent enough to exert its pull on our cultural imagination. Telling the story of modernism is a complex historiographical project that also demands mastery of a discrete (but large, diverse, and constantly expanding) body of knowledge. It is both simpler and far more complicated than it seems.One of the major challenges facing scholars of modernism is the many ways in which—as a discipline and as a culture—we are still breathing the air of modernist ideology ourselves.1 I refer to modernism’s celebration of revolution, rupture, and shock, its desire to jettison the past in favor of beginning afresh, its rapturous idealizations of heroic artist/critics whose adversarial stance vis-à-vis the culture and its institutions mark them as somehow freer or purer than the cultural and historical conditions of possibility from which they emerged. All of these tendencies—along with all of their political, aesthetic, and social implications—appear in multiple historical moments, but they come to a thundering crescendo during the modernist moment, and they continue to exert a powerful hold on us today.Modernism’s stark binaries between center and periphery, subversion and containment, rebellion and complacency, revolution and institution have also furnished us with some of our most durable critical, political, aesthetic, and historical truisms. How subversive energies become codified and institutionalized (and what is lost and gained through this process) is at once the story of modernism itself, and the story of the field of modernist studies, which has struggled since at least the era of Lionel Trilling with the problem of what it means to canonize rebellion. But not only would a fuller understanding of the field require a richer sense of the ongoing ideological influence of modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound on modernist studies, it would also need to take into account later generations of charismatic thinkers such as Trilling, Irving Howe, or Roger Shattuck, who consolidated and canonized their own vision of modernism (along with the profession of literary criticism as we know it) at midcentury. Rediscovering the complexity and contentiousness of the movement as it emerged and responding to these two mutually reinforcing incarnations from the modernist and the midcentury moments is all the more difficult because these ideas are so fundamental to the self-understanding of our discipline. Indeed, the history of modernism’s invention, canonization, and transformation could also be told as the history of literary studies as a field. As a result, sorting these questions out can sometimes seem a project better suited to the psychoanalyst’s couch than to the literary historian’s record.Now for the good news: the Bloomsbury New Modernisms series is ably equipped to help us address these challenges. For scholars and students in the field, and those outside of it, who want to familiarize themselves with modernism as an ongoing set of problems, questions, and approaches, this collection of slim volumes (each about 200 pages long) will offer a clear-eyed and comprehensive introduction to many different facets of the new modernist studies, one that moves with authority and elegance among the tangled philosophical issues raised by the topic, its definition, and its central concepts. At the same time, it offers a richly informative survey of the field from a variety of angles.The many incarnations of modernism over the course of the twentieth century is one story, among others, told by Sean Latham and Gayle Roger’s introductory entry in the series, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea. As its title suggests, this book is primarily a historiographical project, although in the process of offering its history of the “idea” of modernism it covers a lot of important ground, introducing the reader to key figures of the modernist movement and to the story of modernism’s changing legacy over the course of the past century. It is an elegant, lucid, and helpful introduction to the field of modernist studies. Yet— and to its very great credit—it does not shy away from the definitional problems I have described but weaves them into a clear articulation of the difficulties and contradictions at the heart of modernism as a project and as a field.The book begins to historicize the established narrative of modernism with the claim that “there is no such thing as modernism— no singular definition capable of bringing order to the diverse multitude of creators, manifestoes, practices, and politics that have been variously constellated around this enigmatic term” (1). Having dispensed with the problem of offering a singular definition, Latham and Rogers turn in a different direction, explaining, “Our focus is on the formulation and reception of modernism—the ways in which its intellectual and cultural histories have been made” (3). The authors are careful to specify that their approach comes with its own constraints and limitations, namely that they will be examining the idea of modernism not just as it existed in its original form, but as it has been refracted and reflected by the critics, teachers, and artists who have built, destroyed, and rebuilt it over the past century.Lest it seem that the book concerns itself only with a hall of critical mirrors, Latham and Rogers do acknowledge the ways in which modernism itself arose in response to new social, political, and economic developments. As they put it, “Something was happening. . . . The established conventions of realism, representation, and poetic form seemed to be failing in the face of new experiences, new audience, and new things” (11). Their story of canonization, popularization, invention, branding, public relations, and cultural capital (an approach very much in the spirit of the new modernist studies) calls attention to the many mediating factors that intervene between so-called historical conditions and forms of aesthetic expression, adding a layer of welcome complexity to their narrative of development. According to Latham and Rogers, “Amid this enormous expansion . . . modernism becomes less a single tradition or a byword for difficulty than a prismatic way of describing all kinds of aesthetic responses to the turbulence of modernity” (15).Because their history of modernism is significantly institutional and disciplinary, Latham and Rogers are able successfully to navigate the intellectual shoals of historical determinism and formal essentialism on which so many stories of modernism, from Edmund Wilson to Fredric Jameson, have depended.2 To aid them in this undertaking, they organize the volume around two competing figures for modernism. The first of these is based on Joyce’s “strandentwining cable,” an imaginary umbilical cord Stephen Dedalus envisions as he strolls on the beach in the “Proteus” chapter of Ulysses. The second image is that of a plate filled with iron filings whose shapes change as a magnet is moved beneath it. This image, taken from Pound, captures “a plural . . . array of patterns and shapes produced as different critical magnets are dragged through the heaped filings of the twentieth century (11). The idea is that the cable stands for the development of a tradition or canon that includes and excludes particular texts based on some fairly stable criteria mostly having to do with formal innovation. The iron filings, on the other hand, are intended to capture the many movements, ideologies, and interpretations that have followed in the wake of modernism, reshaping existing texts into new patterns and systems after the fact, suggesting that the canon itself is variable and placing its emphasis not on individual great texts but on organizing theories and visions.Neither of these images is static or simple; in both cases change, motion, and transformation are built into the image itself. If this makes them hard to follow, or at times to feel a little bit tortured, this is probably because Latham and Rogers are using them not only to clarify competing visions of modernism but also to illustrate the complexity and the volatility of the problems they are describing. The difficulty of these images is also very much in the spirit of modernist thought, as is their tendency to metamorphose from one form to another: they function in the spirit of Pater’s “hard, gemlike flame,” and Marx’s “All that is solid melts into air,” arguably two of the founding metaphors of modernism. To make matters still more complex, the image of cables transforms itself into a third image of networks, which serves as the organizing metaphor for the book’s final chapter.Latham and Rogers use these images not just to capture competing visions of modernism but to organize the chapters of their book. The figures of the cable and the iron filings are useful insofar as the story they are telling is not a singular narrative of modernism’s development but, rather, a series of competing narratives, each of which has been laid palimpsestically on top of the ones that came before. The chapters thus move chronologically, but they inevitably circle back on each other as new understandings, interpretations, and motives behind the competing visions of modernism are revealed.In the first chapter, “The Emergence of Modernism,” Latham and Rogers explain how aesthetic and creative ferment, change, and conflict were consolidated into a coherent term and movement by influential founding artists and theorists of modernism such as Pound, Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Q. D. Leavis, and others during the first half of the twentieth century. The second chapter, “Consolidation,” elaborates further on this process, examining the way modernism shifted from a set of affiliated artistic movements to an academic field of study. In this chapter, Latham and Rogers examine influential collections and essays by Irving Howe, Harry Levin, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Lionel Trilling, and many others who were instrumental in creating modernism’s midcentury incarnation, which, as I have already mentioned, is probably just as influential as the version created by the modernists themselves.The third chapter, “Iron Filings,” moves away from this story of consolidation and describes the ways in which, beyond the project of establishing a coherent modernist canon, another project was also underway, a project to acknowledge a wider (and in some cases) different array of aesthetic practices. Latham and Rogers tell us that “the question of what to do with all these other modern aesthetic and cultural practices—all these things that cannot be easily or only assimilated to the elevated tradition—gave way to alternative definitions of modernism” (104). They then go on to detail the ways in which the influence of feminist, Marxist, race-based, and postmodern criticism, among other approaches, transformed the understanding of modernism and expanded the notion of the sorts of texts that fell within the purview of modernist criticism, including “detective and science fiction genres, commercial graphic design and advertising, . . . jazz, the blues, and Western swing, . . . film, radio, and photography” (103). These approaches, they argue, helped to move once-overlooked authors such as Mina Loy, Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer to the very heart of the modernist canon.The concluding chapter offers “an overview of the New Modernist Studies” that examines “the major nodes that now make a diffuse network of ideas, objects, texts, and approaches while also framing some of the most pressing questions now being asked about modernism” (161). Like the first chapter, this one does not provide a conclusive definition or explanation of modernism, nor does it promise to take a comprehensive measure of the field. Instead, it offers a handful of “capsule summaries” of books that have already appeared or are scheduled to appear in the New Modernisms series. These summaries, according to Latham and Rogers, “are meant . . . to offer a broad survey of the field’s current state” (161). They include Modernism’s Print Cultures and Modernism, Science, and Technology (both included in this review). Other titles include Modernism, Sex, and Gender; Modernism in a Global Context; Modernism and the Law; and Modernism, War, and Violence, all of which have already appeared as additional volumes in the series. (Forthcoming titles include Modernism and Environments; Race and New Modernisms; and Modernism and Mass Media.)This overview makes clear that the goal of the series, like the goal of its first volume, is not to offer a conclusive explanation of modernism as a term but, rather, to give a sense of the many vibrant and generative questions and approaches that currently make up the field of modernist studies.3 Though each book is freestanding and can be taken as an introduction to its own particular approach to modernism, reading several of them simultaneously, as this review has given me the occasion to do, reveals some interesting features of the series worth noting. The first is that difficulties of definition seem far less pressing when specific critical questions or problems are foregrounded. It is instructive to see, for instance, how debates about modernism’s periodization recede into the background when another subject, such as the history of print culture, takes center stage. It doesn’t seem difficult for Faye Hamill and Mark Hussey to specify in Modernism’s Print Cultures, for instance, that the period they are focused on “ranges from 1890 to 1945” and that “this includes the period (from the 1910s to the 1930s) that is most closely associated with high modernism” (7).The second notable element that emerges is the importance of methodological and institutional questions to the new modernist project. Modernism’s Print Cultures is an example of the way in which the efforts of the field include, but go beyond, the expansion of the canon, to question the basic assumptions of modernist (and other) ideologies. Modernism’s Print Cultures, for instance, begins by questioning assumptions about the sorts of texts that are worthy of critical attention, and rejects the notion that artists and critics must write from a nonideological position, one located outside of the economic and cultural institutions in which modernist texts were produced and disseminated. While this approach to modernism does involve a widening of subject matter, what’s really at stake is an expansion of reading practices and interpretative contexts, not just an expansion of the texts included in the canon.Modernism’s Print Cultures opens with a discussion of a long prose poem by Blaise Cendrars. The piece was published as a poster that could be folded into a pamphlet the size of an envelope, featuring the poem, a watercolor, and a map. The generic complexity and difficulty of categorizing this object—whether as a a a or a makes it an image for Modernism’s Print The book on to offer a overview of the history of modernist studies and the study of culture, and of books as It closely examines the of and other forms of that moved between high and culture and sometimes the between Hamill and Hussey reader at the beginning of the volume that book is a to critical in the study of modernism’s print and its in including of criticism, book and studies, and But this makes the story they tell no less as they move and through a broad range of issues modernism and print the central of in the New Renaissance, to the of in print culture, to debates over to the and of modernist volume does a good of the of the new modernist studies and the study of print culture more Of course, was on the move the modernist a period in which the among culture, advertising, and print culture and But the story of this volume concerns the of modernist studies on the one hand and the study of print culture on the Indeed, it is difficult to modernist studies as a field the of studies, print culture, and the of texts, or the of in the modernist little and the of to these texts made by and by studies like those by and and many others in this and Hussey make the additional point in the volume that the modernists themselves were some of the first to print culture a subject of were with and in the literary many of them multiple in what describes as the that from the to the . . . the the and and the as and Hussey it is to an attention to the issues and questions by the term print culture from the century . . . to this like the introductory volume, thus moves between a set of terms and ideas that from modernist thinkers themselves and the on these ideas that have critical of modernism in the that S. Modernism, Science, and to ideas that were influential during modernism. this book also makes its to the new modernist studies very clear from the its goal seems to be different from the two books I have to a moment of and to the of and ideas to the development of modernism as an artistic and literary This is very much in the spirit of Latham and Roger’s placing theories and at its the story of modernism’s development in The of the series takes some of the of no need for to to be the first to this subject or to that critics have its importance or to claim that he will offer conclusive about modernism based on this is thus able to an and for the of this intellectual and to new in some of modernism’s most familiar figures and for instance, reading to as an of in response to the of or the of to be to the development of notion of and comes through in a series of that seem to map the and of to the modernist was the he us, the radio, film, culture, and but also of the and the us to the familiar stories of and transformation from this new us that for that were an . . . included and the of and what later as These will give a sense not only of how the of this volume range but also of its and is at an of discoveries outside the field of and he is at just how these through the of culture, offering for instance, of D. as a response to or as a form of or the influence of on by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and he covers in the introduction range from to to influence on science studies. that are into “The and “The and “The with a to the studies movement as the most recent and development out of and approaches to modernist in as he does is the of he in these chapters and the of ways in which it could have been The range of approaches he includes the and the At moments the of the project seems to to the of this volume and the by at the beginning of The of this is mostly is a element to much of the in this series, in the sense that many of the historical questions that are being asked are also might understand the New Modernisms series to be the question of whether modernism can be read as an in sense to what we are still the same as our modernist If the intellectual challenges of this problem are made clear by the first book in the series, the other two books I have each their own multiple ways of the both intellectual and historical, between the modernist moment and our Bloomsbury series clearly with the complex questions and problems by the new modernist studies, to the of a field that has been and in recent Though I have not the to read all the books in the series, I can with of Modernism in a Global a book that very and to with theories of and debates about and reading modernism in a variety of contexts, from to modernism, the book “a more a more understanding of what modernism does when it is on the as a this series should make it harder for critics to into the sorts of and about modernism and modernist studies that have the field since its For scholars who to go beyond of modernist studies and to a sense of it has and as a field, Bloomsbury’s series will serve as an

To consider the most influential Argentine writer of the 20th century within the South American cultural and historical framework implies going deeper in a literature that put the periphery—the margins, the minor literature—forward as a particular place of enunciation, not only by destiny but also by choice, as an imaginary place of freedom derived from the lack of cultural tradition tied to a territory. After some years in Europe as a youth, in 1921, Jorge Luis Borges went back to Buenos Aires, where he took part in avant-garde projects and little magazines, as well as in mass circulation publishing and journalistic endeavors. It was in this junction of Modernism and mass culture that, from the 1930s, he began to create his sophisticated fictions, which fully exploited the resources of a second-hand culture, made of hybrid genres, clippings, displacements, plagiarism, and mistranslations, making artistic innovations from some of the most usual practices in printed culture. In the following decade, his anti-Hispanism and his appreciation of certain forms of Argentinian orality were paradoxically combined with his militancy against nationalism. The peripheral condition he addressed in one of his most famous essays (“The Argentine Writer and Tradition”), which stands as a theoretical and critical locus that could decenter Western tradition in its entirety, was an argument stated from a particular time and place against the realism and the nationalism that predominated in the vernacular literary field. His opinions on literary, cultural, or political matters (veiled, as in “The Aleph,” or more visible, as in his anti-Peronist texts “L’Illusion Comique,” “The Monster’s Feast,” and “The Mountebank”) present a minefield of controversial interventions in the Argentinian disputes of his time and account for a specifically Borgesian way—self-interested, instrumental, strategic—of taking part in the dilemmas of the history and the culture that he was part of. Borges has sparked various responses throughout time in Argentina. Some milestones are the tributes to him by the Megáfono group, in 1933, and by Sur magazine in the 1940s, the Contorno patricide trial in the following decade, the Borges “for the masses” in the 1970s, and the generalized rejection of his support for military dictatorships (the one that overthrew Perón in 1955 and the one that began in 1976). In 2009, the literary experiment of a young writer using one of the most famous short stories by Borges gave rise to a lawsuit for copyright fraud, which, in turn, triggered intellectual debates on literary heritage in a socially significant and broader sense, reinstating the problematic—and not merely legal—character of literary property. A well-nourished history tells how, in Argentina, consecutive generations of authors, critics, and readers have dealt with one of their most challenging and intense writers, wondering how to read him, how to get away from the fascination he causes, and how to make his powerful legacy their own.

Post-Fordism would suggest to critical social workers that the various contexts of practice have all the characteristics of an industry undergoing significant restructuring. Social work, critical or otherwise, inevitably deals with a radically reconstituted welfare system, the contours and effects of which are often not fully understood from the vantage point of university students. Social work generally is aligned to sets of social, economic and political conditions represented by the Keynesian welfare state which no longer exist. Effective critical social work in the current workfare world of welfare has three essential components: a critical analysis; critical reflexivity combined with a critical consciousness; and critical politics. The characteristics of that environment have altered significantly, designing out ‘spaces’ where critical social work could be practised. Social policy is now focused on transforming the ‘identities, interests, capacities, rights and responsibilities’ of its citizens so that they may become active agents in the pursuit of a competitive edge in a global economy.

We chose to frame this conversation in terms of crisis: not only the state of permanent crisis created by racial capitalism and settler colonialism but also specific flashpoints like Sa-I-Gu [the Korean term for the April 1992 uprising in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating]. We want to look at the conditions surrounding these flashpoints and the responses to them that then shaped race consciousness and politics subsequently. Today we have no shortage of crisis, no shortage of flashpoints. And yet there is hope. Perhaps more than at any other time in my lifetime, there are opportunities to shift mass culture, at the very least to popularize and normalize a slightly more critical consciousness. So now I want to turn to my friends here to talk about crisis and multiracial politics. We’ll start with Sa-I-Gu and work forward to this moment and also to future possibilities.

Although psychology has an ample vocabulary for describing individual pathologies, the development of theory and concepts for understanding societal pathology remains in its infancy. Because community psychology theory views human behavior in its context, it is essential that interventions not be limited to stress management, personal coping, and similar programming. Interventions should not leave social injustice undiscussed and unchallenged. In this spirit we present a theory of oppression and sociopolitical development that informs an intervention with young, African American men in an urban setting. The five‐stage theory highlights the role of Freire's notion of “critical consciousness,” a sociopolitical version of critical thinking, in enhancing an awareness of sociopolitical as well as personal forces that influence behavior. The theory also draws on African American social‐change traditions and their spiritual aspects. The action section of the study describes the Young Warriors program's use of mass culture (rap videos and film) as stimuli for the development of critical consciousness. Highlights from an empirical investigation of an eight‐session high school version of the program will be presented to illustrate the practical challenges and benefits of sociopolitical interventions.

The "Right-Looking Girl" in the Raccoon Coat:How to Read a Cliché, Like Franny Glass Laurie A. Rodrigues (bio) Upon the initial release of J.D. Salinger's second, long-form fictional work, Franny and Zooey (1961), Alfred Kazin, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Leslie Fiedler, John Updike, and others in American literary discourse, responded negatively, expressing marked annoyance with the book's Glass family.1 To Salinger's literary contemporaries, the Glasses (first appearing in Salinger's stories for the New Yorker during the 1950s) reflected a creative indulgence, lowering the degree of Salinger's artistic accomplishment.2 Here, I explore another reason for critics' annoyance with Franny and Zooey, one that suggests a new, historically-informed understanding of Salinger's "literary deviance and irony" (Malcolm). Situated at the crossroads of the 1950s' emerging cultural debates on women's rights and institutionalized sexism, Franny and Zooey refuses to critique or promote either sociological or popular theories addressing Franny Glass's narrative-driving breakdown at Sickler's restaurant and subsequent crisis at her family home in Manhattan. This ambivalence made the text difficult to evaluate in its own time; thus, I open a new discussion of Franny and Zooey, examining its commentary on the effects of mass cultural images and representations of women. At a historical moment when feminist discourses were delimited to academe, and mass culture found currency in sensationalizing women's problems, I claim that Salinger used "Franny" and its mass culture-reminiscent narrator to reveal and review the clichés that assemble postwar femininity and womanhood; and in [End Page 120] "Zooey," the near-mythic operations of American cultural clichés are critiqued through a shift in narrative perspective, to the dismissive and mature socio-political point of view of Franny's brother, Buddy Glass. My use of "cliché" refers to the work of literary and cultural critic, Marshall McLuhan. According to McLuhan, the "cultural cliché" appears and proliferates through various media, contributing to the construction of cultural environments: cliché may appear as an homage implied by character wardrobe; in the composition of a letter; or, it may manifest as setting.3 Thus, clichés are pervasive and through the environments they construct, may eventually forge breakthroughs in cultural understanding.4 McLuhan's work on the social effects of mass culture gained prominence around the time of Franny and Zooey's release in 1961, and his work explores paradigm shifts in interpretive values that are stylistically reflected in Salinger's prose. Thus, both McLuhan and Salinger use their work to analyze (and sometimes ironize) the centrality of the cliché to American culture, society, and the relation between the two.5 For instance, Salinger cites Franny's "sheared raccoon coat" as an initial cultural cliché in defining his protagonist. This cliché not only begins to formulate Franny herself, but readers' initial interpretations of her environment and ensuing crisis: [Franny] was wearing a sheared racoon coat, and Lane, walking toward her quickly but with a slow face, reasoned to himself, with suppressed excitement, that he was the only one on the platform who really knew Franny's coat. He remembered that once, in a borrowed car, after kissing Franny for a half hour or so, he had kissed her coat lapel, as though it were a perfectly desirable, organic extension of the person herself. (7) Acclimating readers to Franny and her environment, Salinger adorns his protagonist with an expansive cliché for 1955: the raccoon coat. Franny's date, Lane Coutell, spots her on a train platform where she arrives to spend the weekend of a Yale football game in an unnamed college town. Lane's reaction to Franny's coat sparks Salinger's expression of the cultural capital that the garment signals for his protagonist; the coat's place in [End Page 121] fashion is key to Salinger's expression in "Franny," contributing to the narrative ground in which Franny's crisis unfolds. In 1955, Franny's coat (likely vintage, if not vintage-reproduction) would have been considered very chic.6 Franny's "sheared raccoon coat" recalls Sue Salzman, a New York socialite, whose sudden desire to find "a true raccoon" turned her personal preoccupation with pre-Depression style...

Between Humanism and Late Style Lecia Rosenthal (bio) The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself: That is what everything new suffers from. —Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory "A Kind of Heroism" As far as criticism goes, there are, according to Edward Said, two ways of thinking about the future. The first is oriented intrinsically, positing futurity within the boundaries of an already existing tradition. This mode is essentially conservative, its vision of the future self-confirming and dedicated to reproducing its own continuity. "Such critical activities set not only discrete and finite goals that can be accomplished within one or two works of criticism, but also larger goals that may include the production of many more works of that particular type and the transformation of idle readers into active believers in, practitioners of, a certain kind of criticism" (Said, "Future of Criticism," 166). Thus this mode of criticism projects the future as an extension of the already thought, a repetition of the past and its achieved conclusions. Rigidly "systematic and doctrinal" (170), it produces disciples and resists change. Appropriating the unknown into an already settled horizon of the known, this mode of criticism negates the radical potential of futurity and thus, according to Said, has no future at all. For readers of Said's work, it will come as no surprise that he is quite critical of this first approach. While he acknowledges that it is "dialectically interwoven" with the second mode of criticism, it is clear that, however necessary the former may be, Said uses it primarily to establish the limitations and blind spots he wants the second to overcome. In this second, alternative mode, the future extends beyond [End Page 107] one that would remain its "own." Recognizing and indeed insist-ing upon the possibility of criticism's "extrinsic" effects, this mode eschews disciples and resists codification. Perhaps most crucially, in its openness to an encounter with the "external" world (the outline of the extrinsic, and indeed that which would render it as such, is necessarily incomplete and shifting, but Said does allude to a range of contextual-historical formations ignored by criticism in its first mode; these include nonacademic institutions, mass culture, and the "claims of feminism, of Europe's others, of subaltern cultures, of theoretical currents running counter to the rule of affirmatively dominant pragmatism and empiricism" ["Future of Criticism," 169]), this mode of criticism resists the becoming-obsolete of criticism itself. For Said, such marginalization implies not simply the threat of relative silence, obscurity, and irrelevance, or a kind of historical senescence of the intellectual's social power, but rather the already prevalent domestication of a criticism all too easily managed by "the institutions of a mass society whose aim is nothing less than a political quiescence" (171). How does Said argue for the latter model of intellectual practice? Indeed, can there be a model for that which remains open to the future as undomesticated, undecided, and radically unsystematizable alterity? Said's argument in "The Future of Criticism" points a tension that persists throughout his work as it reflects on and elaborates various models, ideals, and possible futures of critical practice. Extrapolating from the two modes of futurity outlined above, this tension can be described as a vacillation between affirmative normativity and critique of totality; between the possibility of prescriptive completion and an emphasis on resistance and the open-ended; between an approach to the new as dialectical expansion of the already thought and as radical irruption of the unassimilated, the incommensurable, and perhaps even the unthinkable. In Said's late works, this tension will become one, if not more than one, between humanism and late style. From the outset, I hope to be clear (clarity, as readers of Said's early, middle, and late works will recall, is a measure of a critic's self-restraint)1 that I am not proposing to locate any strict or static division between Said's work on late style and his call for a return (if a return it is) to the values of humanist practice. Rather, I am interested [End Page 108] in the ways in which Said's late works, which...