El conde-duque y la esfera pública: autoría y ocasión del Chitón de las tarabillas

For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt’s sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt’s use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt’s situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its temporal dimension. We make explicit another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt’s neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt’s authority depends on a dichotomy between the private (education, the child) and the public sphere (politics, the adult). This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt’s feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority in-between private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future (time), world and earth (space), and the private and public sphere (relation). This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority.

Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire

Practices of branding, promotion, and persona have become dominant influences structuring identity formation in popular culture. Creating an iconic brand identity is now an essential practice required for politicians, celebrities, global leaders, and other public figures to establish their image within a competitive media landscape shaped by consumer society. This dissertation analyzes the construction and circulation of Vivienne Westwood, Barack Obama, and Pope Francis as iconic brand identities in contemporary media and consumer culture. The content analysis and close textual analysis of select media coverage and other relevant material on key moments, events, and cultural texts associated with each figure deconstructs the media representation of Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis. The brand identities of Westwood, Pope Francis, and Obama ultimately exhibit a unique form of iconic symbolic power, and exploring the complex dynamics shaping their public image demonstrates how they have achieved and maintained positions of authority. Although Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis initially were each positioned as outsiders to the institutions of fashion, politics, and religion that they now represent, the media played a key role in mainstreaming their image for public consumption. Their iconic brand identities symbolize the influence of consumption in shaping how issues of public good circulate within public discourse, particularly in regard to the economy, health care, social inequality, and the environment. Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis are also texts used to promote the institutions they represent, and it is this aspect of their public image that illuminates the inherent contradictions between individual and institution underlying their brand identities. Interrogating the iconic identities of Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis reveals how it is the labour and strategy behind the brand that creates meaning in consumer culture. Westwood, Obama, and Pope Francis are important figures for analysis because their iconic brand identities transcend the foundations of fashion, politics, and religion, and more significantly, demonstrate how branding as a promotional strategy is not unique to any particular realm or institution but a technique utilized by public figures regardless of the celebrity or elite status associated with their position.

This article enquires into imaginations of ‘political masculinity’ in a Caribbean-British context and the engagement of artists with the ideologies of the political sphere and their co-construction of it. The article focuses on gendered strategies of political self-fashioning in George Lamming’s Water With Berries and Orlando Patterson’s An Absence of Ruins, which emerge from the tension between political engagement and artistic detachment that structures the work and public image of Caribbean artists and their political interpellation into the public sphere. I propose that artists manoeuvre in a political field of tension as regards citizenship, nation building and cultural authority – themselves inherently gendered concepts – by problematising the basis of black revolutionary politics as tied to essentialised codes of masculinity that in turn rest on specific ideals of cultural authority, such as the (Victorian) ‘man of letters’, the ‘peasant’ or ‘folk hero’, or a more radical political masculine blackness associated with Black Power.

Paul Keen. The Crisis o f Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the PublicSphere. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1999. Pp. 300. Like many scholars and critics of the past few decades, Paul Keen (of Carleton University) examines the place of literature in the world-his­ torical revolution of the 1790s in order to reflect on what many see as a world-historical crisis today. As Keen states, the “object” of The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere “is the long history of the changing status of literature as a public sphere, but its focus crystallizes in the 1790s when the contradictions inherent in this discourse were most dramatically foregrounded” (10). Historicizing literature and the 1790s enables us to historicize the present, when historicism is understood as a major instrument of critical analysis for us now. Keen’s history is an exemplary development of this use of historicism. Its roots are in the post-war transformation in universities and aca­ demic disciplines as thousands of students, and eventually professors, from classes and social groups who historically had not participated in higher education challenged received academic and cultural institutions, attitudes, and assumptions. One result was the rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s of historical studies building on a leftist tradition of social his­ tory, and examining the classes and groups from which such students and professors themselves came. In English studies, major beneficiaries were historical periods characterized by lower- and middle-class resis­ tance, protest, and revolt such as the English Civil War and the era of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. The past three decades have seen a steady development of research on those periods, among others. Over these decades, such work has responded in various ways and degrees to the rise of critical sociology, the “linguistic turn,” structuralist and post-structuralist theory, new Marxism, psychoanalytic theory, and feminism during the 1970s; to post-colonial theory and criticism and theories and histories of sexuality during the 1980s; and, increasing after 1989 and the proclaimed triumph of liberalism, to renewed interest in the nature of civil society and the public sphere, and in the history and destiny of the modern liberal state. For the Revolutionary and Romantic period alone, these movements in research and criticism, at times interacting, at times collaborating, at times contending, have produced a substantial library of monographs, academic journals, essays, editions, dictionaries and encyclopaedias, publishers’ series, and databases and websites, not to mention conferences, associations, and discussion lists. The revolu- tion—be it the social-intellectual revolution of the past half century or the revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—has, it seems, been accommodated in the academy. Whether this accommodation should make us feel comfortable or uneasy is another question. The Crisis ofLiterature in the 1790s is one of the best recent contribu­ tions to this library of Revolution and Romantic studies. It originated as a doctoral dissertation at one centre of historicist Revolutionary-Romantic literary studies, in the University of York (England), led by John Barrell, pioneering scholar in the field. Keen’s book is published in the major venue for such new work—Cambridge Studies in Romanticism edited by two other pioneers, Marilyn Butler of Oxford and James Chandler of Chicago. Like their work, The Crisis ofLiterature grows out of the work of Raymond Williams (with E. P. Thompson’s work also in the background). Keen also scrupulously employs insights from most of the critical and theoretical movements described earlier, especially new left, feminist, and post-colo­ nial criticism, examining a wide range of texts, literary and non-literary, by writers major and minor, canonical and otherwise. In his introduction, titled “Problems now and then,” Keen points out salient similarities between the 1790s in Britain, at the moment of struggle over formation of the literary institution as it would be known for two centuries, and the new questioning of that institution by a wide array of groups in the late twentieth century. Keen pursues this connection throughout the chapters that follow. In Part One, “The Enlightenment,” he describes the new “republic of letters” and the new “men of letters,” and in Part...

Durante o século XIX, as elites cultas europeias participaram amplamente das querelas e debates fomentados na e pela imprensa, não sendo possível fazer uma história da cultura contemporânea sem a pensar à luz da evolução do espaço público ao longo desse século e na sua transição para o século xx. Contudo, esta aliança entre o homem de letras e a imprensa – expediente característico da esfera pública oitocentista que, aliás, deu origem à designação de «publicista» na segunda metade do século, correspondendo a uma metamorfose do estatuto do «escritor público» do romantismo clássico – rapidamente começou a dar sintomas de rutura, à medida que aquela esfera sofria a influência da industrialização e massificação dos objetos culturais, processo iniciado nos Estados Unidos na segunda metade do século e cujo eco em França foi acompanhado de perto pela evolução histórica em Portugal.Foi neste contexto conjugado, a partir do último quartel do século xix português, de alteração do mercado dos bens culturais, de emergência de uma cultura urbana de massas e de crise das elites cultas, em especial no campo literário, que lentamente surgiu a figura do «artista» como alternativa à figura difusa do «homem de letras», espoletada na última década de oitocentos. Numa leitura de Fradique Mendes − meio personagem, meio autor, proto-heterónimo na ficção queirosiana − e sobre o fradiquismo como ideologia, destaca-se o seu valor simbólico, como derradeira tentativa de superação da morte do intelectual oitocentista através da afirmação do papel do artista. Dito de outro modo, Fradique Mendes constitui-se, num contexto de massificação emergente, como metáfora da crise do velho paradigma de intelectual do século xix que, perseguindo uma «aura perdida da cultura», oscila entre o silêncio de uma desistência, afinal pugnada pelo próprio Eça de Queirós que assim se revia como uma espécie de «cenobita», e a hipótese da figura do artista construir uma nova expressão da elite culta.

The problem of ethics is acute in the modern Ukraine.Its relevance is due to the general level of our society, the low level of social responsibility for what is done in society in all its spheres and what society does. We come across misunderstandings, disrespect for ethics all the time in the process of our lives. Higher education also does not pay due attention to the formation of professional ethics of future professionals. The relevance of the topic is due to the need of Ukrainian society for social workers with a high level of professional ethics and responsibility for performing professional duties and solving complex life problems of the social sphere, as well as updating the search for an effective pedagogical system of professional and ethical competence of future social workers. The aim of the article is a scientific reasoning and experimental verification of the effectiveness of the pedagogical system of formation of professional and ethical competence of future specialists in the social sphere to improve the quality of their professional training. The following research methods are used in the article: logical-structural analysis – to determine the essence and structure of the concept: «professional and ethical competence of future professionals in the social sphere»; structural-systematic analysis – to ensure the complexity of reasoning of the concept and structure of the pedagogical system of formation of professional and ethical competence; modeling – to develop a model for the formation of professional and ethical competence of future professionals in the social sphere; questionnaire-diagnostic methods (questionnaires, testing, interviews, diagnostics) – to establish the effectiveness of the pedagogical system of formation of professional and ethical competence of future specialists in the social sphere. As a result of our research, a pedagogical system of formation of professional and ethical competence of future social specialists was developed and experimentally tested that its effectiveness is ensured by the principles of systemic, humanistic, deontological, axiological, acmeological, personal-activity, subject-subject, competence, andragogical approaches, specific principles, pedagogical conditions and factors. It was based on the author's concept of formation of professional and ethical competence and a model aimed at the formation of moral and ethical values, professional and ethical knowledge, skills and personal-moral and professionally important qualities during training was designed. The obtained results allow us to state that the diagnosis of professional and ethical competence was carried out at the ascertaining and formative stages of the experiment, gave us the opportunity to compare the levels of professional ethics of students of the studied groups and draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the proposed author’s pedagogical system.

Curating a Nation’s Past: The Role of the Public Intellectual in Australia’s History Wars

ABSTRACTWritten by Edward Sellon just before his suicide, The Ups and Downs of Life (1867) is at once a book of pornography and a pornographer’s philosophical testament. This article analyzes the literary strategies, discursive practices and ideological implications that inform this ‘erotic autobiography’, a remarkable text so far neglected by scholarship. With the methodological tools of gender studies and feminist literary criticism, the article examines the porno/autobiographer’s efforts to construct a heroic, heterosexual masculine identity through the discourse of philosophical libertinism, and his tragic failure. The Ups and Downs expands our knowledge of the Victorian subculture of pornography and sheds further light on the relationship between libertinism and masculinity, as well as on the power of pornography to challenge dominant public and literary discourses. With his skilful manipulation of generic categories (the realist novel, the ‘men of letters’ autobiography) and the search for a metaphysics of the flesh, Sellon destabilizes the boundaries between high and low culture: by choosing to recount the ‘ups and downs’ of his life (and of his penis) as an experiment in pornographic writing, he invents a textual space for articulating counter-hegemonic discourses otherwise unspeakable in Victorian culture.

This article explores the use of clothes and other accessories as markers of masculine authorial identity. Fashion and literature are contentious partners, with literature attempting to keep a firm distance from the popular trappings of the fashion world. However, writers have historically used fashion to create their identities beyond the printed word. This can be seen in examples such as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain and the ways clothing items have become associated with their personae as men of letters. Contemporary writers are no different, yet many continue to exude ambivalence towards clothing having any effect on their images in the literary sphere. Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace are two examples of writers who downplay fashion’s role in their public images. Franzen and Wallace establish their positions at the forefront of American literature not only with their fiction and non-fiction works but also in the ways they adorn their bodies and present them within visual media. Nevertheless, both Franzen and Wallace perform as specific types of masculine authors through their fashion choices. Ultimately, they use fashion to brand their authorial identities in accordance with their literary output. Franzen’s and Wallace’s willing participation in the stylization of their images to meet the masculine standards of authorial identity reveals the prevalence of gendered stereotypes regarding how authors should be represented within popular culture.

A pesar de que las características demográficas de Castilla y León la presentan como una de las regiones más envejecidas de Europa, el dato sólo hace que conferir interés al objetivo de analizar el despliegue de herramientas demostrado por los diferentes partidos en la campaña digital de unas elecciones particulares: las autonómicas de 2015. Con la intención de ofrecer la que quizá sea la revisión más exhaustiva realizada hasta la fecha sobre esa vertiente (al menos, en lo que respecta al caso español), el libro que en perfecta simbiosis coordinan el Catedrático de Periodismo José Luis Dader y la profesora Eva Campos profundiza en la disposición a combinar el uso de las tradicionales estrategias de comunicación con otras de nuevo surgimiento, adentrándose en una suerte de experimento ciberpolítico que comienza con una minuciosa observación del campo de actuación.

A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. By Stacy Wolf. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. By her own account, Stacy Wolf wrote A Problem Like Maria to try to make sense of her own passionate attachment to mid-twentieth-century Broadway musicals. Given the widespread understanding of these productions as affirming a dominant American culture that was often racist, sexist, and homophobic, she wonders how she and so many other women she knows could adore musicals, even as they consider themselves feminists and/or identify as (vii). Wolf concludes that many Broadway musicals of this period were internally contradictory in that they simultaneously promoted conservative values and offered representations of women as strong, empowered, and able to escape containment in normative heterosexuality. This contradiction leaves space for spectators to construct alternative readings of characters and narratives, readings that Wolf seeks to theorize. That is, Wolf's project is to reconstruct the queer readings that are readily available to anyone who chooses to analyze these texts from a feminist and perspective. She focuses on four stars--Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Julie Andrews, and Barbra Streisand--who were widely popular with mainstream audiences and who became icons as well, teasing out the ways their complex performances enabled them to appeal powerfully to differently situated spectators. The author has set herself an ambitious and difficult task. She acknowledges that her evidence is less than ideal; since she never saw any of these performers live, she must reconstruct their performances from the traces they have left in original cast recordings, television specials, photographs, contemporary reviews, and the publicity discourses that created these stars' public images. Further, she has no ethnographic evidence from viewers who did see the shows live from which she might construct a profile of how actual spectators read these texts. Wolf's solution to these limitations is imaginative and provocative. She invents a theoretical lesbian viewing position, the quotation marks signifying her recognition that such a viewing position is open to anyone who chooses to read the musicals in this way. From this perspective she rereads each of these four stars and some of their signature performances, illuminating exactly how certain performances might signify to some viewers. She takes as a premise Diana Fuss's argument that there is no natural way to read a text and thus that conventional straight readings of these musicals and their star performers are no more legitimate than the lesbian readings she offers (25). To help make her case Wolf draws extensively from work in film studies and queer studies, fields in which there are well-established theories of spectatorship, stardom, and representation. She is a lively and well-informed guide through these extensive literatures, which she uses persuasively in her readings of the four stars. (1) She also provides extensive historical context for her readings, helpfully outlining the changing social and cultural history of the postwar period and the history and structure of the American musical. Wolf argues that one crucial characteristic of midcentury musicals is their representation of women as strong and active figures whose physical and vocal power and considerable personal agency were unusual in 1950s popular culture. Each of the four stars is then analyzed for the ways that her specific performances and the publicity discourses that surrounded them lend themselves to lesbian readings. Wolf first argues that Mary Martin's tomboyish roles--most notably as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific and as Peter Pan--embodied a joyous gender unconventionality that a lesbian reader can interpret and identify with as queer. Further, Wolf analyzes the ways that much publicity about Martin contained hints that she herself was or bisexual and that her marriage to her manager, Richard Halliday, was a passing marriage that benefited and protected both of them. …

Diversos análisis contemporáneos postulan un cambio del régimen representacional de “lo público” —destitución del lógos por medio de la irrupción de la imagen—. Ante dicho diagnóstico, sugerimos atender a la prematura existencia de un campo visual constitutivo de “lo público”. Se compone allí un régimen de imágenes que expresa las condiciones de visibilidad y las gramáticas del orden cívico que diagraman el nacimiento de la ciudad y la “comunidad política”. Postulamos aquí la necesidad de emprender una “arqueología visual de lo público” que advierta la densidad histórica, figurativa y performativa de una incipiente configuración de la “imagen pública” y del orden visual de “lo público”.

This contribution outlines two theoretical frameworks – behaviorist and reflexive – for considering the discursive interaction between states and international organizations within treaty monitoring (a process of assessing states’ compliance with international treaties). Monitoring is seen as a communicative process, aimed at building and sustaining the interlocutors’ public images and constituted by a series of multi-directed follow-ups. This definition emphasizes the importance of anticipation and silence in pre-structured diplomatic communication. The two suggested frameworks lie across the ontological divide. The behaviorist framework relies on an actor/speaker-oriented view of social interaction, conceives of actors as rational, strategizing beings performing cost-benefit calculations to define their discursive choices, and conceptualizes the participants’ concern with their public image in terms of ‘face wants’. The reflexive framework looks at how states and international organizations (IOs) use the monitoring exchange to (re)construct their relationship while projecting a specific image into the public sphere. Continuity of the interaction, intensity and regularity of the exchange within treaty monitoring provide IOs with sources of power and thus allow rebalancing the initially asymmetrical set-up. The frameworks are illustrated using the example of the monitoring mechanism of the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.

El libro que nos ocupa es un sugestivo ensayo que surge de un proceso de reflexión e indagación académicas que ya es prolongado en el tiempo, pero que, sobre todo, brilla con luz propia por la fecundidad y calidad de los hallazgos previos. Sus autores, en efecto, han establecido una fructífera colaboración en el campo -necesariamente híbrido- de la comunicación política que les ha llevado a analizar con particular profundidad y acierto los nuevos fenómenos de movilización política surgidos en los últimos años y muy particularmente en el caso español, que se sustancia especialmente en dos objetos de estudio específicos, claramente interrelacionados: el movimiento del 15M de 2011 y el partido político Podemos, surgido tres años después, pero cuya vinculación en distintos órdenes con dicho movimiento se antoja muy clara.