Contemporary Public Culture Research Articles

Is my best friend toxic? A textual analysis of online advice on difficult relationships

In this article, we analyse how mediated discourses of toxic friendships echo and reconstruct the category of the toxic friend. We ask: what kind of assumptions does the toxic friendship discourse draw on, and what forms of subjectivity and interpersonal relationships are encouraged? Employing a critical discourse analysis of digital texts, we argue that the discursive category of the toxic friend draws on a simplistic set of classificatory dichotomies distinguishing between the good and the toxic friend. We also suggest that the popular labelling of difficult friendships as ‘toxic’ reflects the contemporary diffusion of the notion of toxicity in contemporary public culture. We contend that this discourse reflects the discursive conflation between therapeutic culture and neoliberal wellness logic, with the figure of the toxic friend constructed in ways that support imperatives for self-care and self-governance. While much of the advice situates friendship as an important personal tie, there is very little encouragement to ‘work’ on these relationships. As such, these discourses offer a reductive, disposable approach to friendship ties that overlooks the complexities and lived experiences of friendship relations.

Muslim Household, Nation and Urdu in Television Dramas of Pakistan

The article explores the genealogies of Muslim cultural and Urdu language reform in late nineteenth century colonial India and traces its post-colonial trajectories in contemporary public culture in Pakistan. It does so by analysing the language and gender politics of Urdu in two Pakistani TV dramas, Aangan Terha (Crooked Courtyard), written by Anwar Maqsood and screened on the government-run Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV) channel in 1984, and Quddusi Sahab ki Bewah (The Widow of Mr. Quddusi), scripted by Faseeh Bari Khan, which was telecast on ARY Digital, a global private satellite channel, in 2012. The article emphasises the gendered language and performative politics of Urdu and respectability in colonial and post-colonial South Asia.

Незавершенный Лувр: общее место как способ присвоения

In contemporary public culture, there is a stereotypical interpretation of the history of the Louvre Palace as multiple successive attempts to achieve a ‘Grand design’ that dates back to the 16th century. However, this vision of the history of the Louvre does not emerge until the 19th century, although the narrative of its unfinishedness has existed for much longer. This article analyses the origins and transformation of this narrative throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Despite the linguistic continuity associated with the stability of the very expression achever le Louvre (to finish the Louvre), the meaning that was invested in the idea of completion underwent significant changes. Originating in the context of the establishment and glorification of Louis XIV’s strong royal rule, the narrative was subsequently borrowed by critics of his great-grandson Louis XV’s reign and played a significant role in establishing the royal palace as a national treasure. By the 1760-s, in public discussions about the Louvre its completion becomes an allegory of a process of civilisation carried out in the name of the national interest. The changes that took place contributed greatly to the subsequent interpretation of the history of the Louvre and facilitated an ambitious project to merge it with the Tuileries Palace.

Ethical Underpinning and Implications of “Nootropic” Concept

The current generation paving the path for new research marks a milestone to attain the ancient goal of improving our cognition. To date, increased prevalence of cognitive enhancers by healthy people has raised the scientific community’s attention as well as media coverage. In particular, nootropics such as piracetam promise to offer modest improvements in cognitive performance. The long-lasting impetus of this “holistic enhancer” convinced scientists as well as ethicists to discuss its potential ethical implications and future directions. Moreover, there are discrepancies in the concept of a true nootropic between pharmacology and contemporary public culture. Here, I review the ethical aspects of nootropics raised by its potential use in cognition enhancement and substantiate the epistemological commentary on the concept of nootropic.

사임당(師任堂)의 현대 대중문화예술 속의 변모와 그 의미 - 사임당 소재 TV 드라마 [사임당, 빛의 일기] 속 형상화를 중심으로 -

사임당(師任堂)의 현대 대중문화예술 속의 변모와 그 의미 - 사임당 소재 TV 드라마 [사임당, 빛의 일기] 속 형상화를 중심으로 -

Caught on camera, posted online: mediated moralities, visual politics and the case of urban ‘drought-shaming’

The ‘shaming’ of subjects caught on camera, engaging in socially transgressive acts of varying kinds, has become a familiar occurrence and locus of ambivalent possibility in contemporary public culture. In this article, I theorise the socio-moral complexities and visual politics of ostensibly civic forms of online shaming through an in-depth analysis of a single case: urban ‘drought-shaming’ in California (2014–2015). Drawing on interpretive methods of social analysis and anchored by the classical sociological tradition, I highlight the role of images, especially the circulation of still photographs taken and posted by ordinary members, in the emerging problematisation of excessive water use at the centre of this case. Understood as a vital and diminishing resource within an interconnected and interdependent social order, water was made sacred; it was prohibited from being handled in mundane or carelessly reckless ways during the drought. A state-of-emergency came to be constituted (also) as a moral drama. The language and practices constitutive of drought-shaming, I argue, contributed to a popular sociological imagination of water use whose critical dimensions transcend the specificities of this case. To highlight its ritual structure within the context of a viable and organically solidaristic collective order, I compare online civic shaming with the ‘status degradation ceremony’, as theorised by Harold Garfinkel in the 1950s. Comparable in that it constitutes a new form of public denunciation with socially integrative and renewing possibilities, there are also differences that shed light onto some of the new and defining elements of public shaming in a digitally convergent, visually mediated, and (more) participatory media-sphere. Finally, revealing significant overlap and collaboration between social, news, and tabloid media in the social production of mediated shaming today, this study is located at the border of visual sociology and a critical sociology of visual representation in contemporary mediated society.

‘When he’s in Afghanistan it’s like our world/his world’: mediating military experience

This article reports on a qualitative research project which invited those with direct experience – as serving personnel involved in media operations, military veterans and forces family members – to respond to a variety of media genres and discuss how such portrayals of military experience correspond with their own perceptions and their own representational practices. It is our contention that such mediations offer significant and interconnected spaces through which to explore negotiations of the meanings of military experience in contemporary public culture. Drawing on thematic analysis from our focus groups, we address a number of research questions: In what ways do the participants identify and engage with the various media portrayals, and how do they think this relates to the perceived public profile of the armed forces? How do they assess the capability of media texts to provide insights into the ‘realities’ of military experience (including emotionally charged moments of camaraderie and trauma)? In the multiple challenges and ambiguities heard within our groups, we find complex and troubled senses of ‘militariness’, bound up with sometimes intense affectivities.

Civic Sights: Theorizing Deliberative and Photographic Publicity in the Visual Public Sphere

AbstractFoundational theories of the public sphere prioritize civic speech while distrusting forms of visuality. As a corrective to this model of the public sphere, rhetorical theorists have recently emphasized visuality as a constitutive mode of contemporary public culture, but they nevertheless tend to prioritize the civic actor over the civic spectator. A productive alternative would begin to distinguish an emerging shift from “deliberative publicity” to “photographic publicity.” The bourgeois public sphere innovated verbal communicative practices that produced a specifically deliberative publicity, enabling one resolution to the core political problems of an earlier (feudal) era. Likewise, contemporary publics utilize emerging digital technologies to produce a specifically photographic publicity, allowing them to address fundamental limitations of the bourgeois public sphere. Photographic publicity helps us rethink the problem of the public sphere in terms of theatricality and civic spectatorship.

Unity and Duality in Barack Obama's “A More Perfect Union”

Faced with a racialized political crisis that threatened to derail his campaign to become the first African American president of the United States, Barack Obama delivered a speech on race titled “A More Perfect Union.” He begins by portraying himself as an embodiment of double consciousness, but then invites his audience to share his doubled perspective, and finally models a doubled mode of speaking and acting that is captioned by the well-known maxim, the Golden Rule. This speech text thus contributes discursive resources required for the productive doubling necessary for the successful negotiation of contemporary public culture.

Feeling National, Feeling Global: Class, Sentiment, and American Literary History

Bruce Robbins is prolific and versatile; a comparativist by training, he has written widely about British, French, and American texts. His four monographs represent some of the most compelling attempts I know of, by a US cultural studies scholar, to think through the interrelations of “culture,” politics, class, and what Robbins (following “world system” theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein) terms the “international division of labor” (Robbins, Upward 239). As his Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993) and collections like Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (1990) and The Phantom Public Sphere (1993) indicate, Robbins has written frequently on the role of intellectuals in contemporary public culture and has made impassioned, well-reasoned arguments for the political importance of the academic study of literature and culture. I turn to Robbins's brave and risky work, such as “The Sweatshop Sublime” in PMLA on the complexities of transnational sympathy in the global era, to think about the ethical and political stakes of what I'm doing. If Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999) is impressive for the vigor and clarity of its arguments about contemporary politics, Robbins's two literary studies showcase his sensitivity, rigor, and imagination as a reader of cultural texts and the sheer breadth of his literary knowledge. Both his earlier work, The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986), and, more recently, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (2007), perform a kind of magic feat in resurrecting traditions hidden, as it were, in plain sight—in the former, the recurring appearance, in canonical British fiction, of the highly conventionalized “literary servant” as a figure of/for class; in the latter, an “archive” (he hesitatingly designates it a “genre”) of mobility narratives that comprises the “literary history of the welfare state”—and deftly teases out the complex political import of that tradition. The Servant's Hand focuses on British fiction, but its central argument—that class and its utopian energies and erotics are registered through the “anachronistic,” “vestigial” character of the literary servant, a “figure of the people's subordination” (42, 25)—is certainly relevant to American literary history; in its brilliant reading of The Turn of the Screw (1898) and suggestive contextualization of the shaving scene in Benito Cereno (1856), The Servant's Hand demonstrates how “trans-atlantic” literary knowledge (not to mention the more robust analysis of class in nineteenth-century British studies more broadly) can shed critical light on the political meanings (and neglected class accents) of nineteenth-century US literature. Given its national focus, The Servant's Hand was, unsurprisingly, not reviewed in Americanist literary journals, but for its political and theoretical sophistication, its insistence that class matters, and its suggestive linking of class, affect, and sexuality, it ought to have been an important text for Americanists, and it serves as a useful introduction to Robbins's latest book, which explicitly takes up a wealth of US cultural materials.

Shadows of Democracy in Presidential Rhetoric: An Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly adopts a rhetorical perspective to focus attention on the presidency as it operates in the hyper-symbolic political milieu that is contemporary public culture. It asks us to consider the question of democracy's prospects within the present state of presidential rhetoric. By engaging the theme of the shadow, it suggests that democracy's mythic representation in the current presidential idiom is troubled. Myth is taken variously to designate imaginary phenomena, falsehoods, and traditional stories, allegories, images, and archetypes that express a people's worldview, including the popular beliefs that comprise national attitudes, ideals, and identities. It serves as a vehicle to engage presidential discourse for the purpose of assessing its significance to public culture. In this regard, public culture is understood to be a complex of ideas, attitudes, beliefs, values, and habits that constitute a political way of life governed by a shared system of meaning and persuasive practices. The opening essay by Robert Ivie and Oscar Giner examines the archetypal recesses of terror and the mythic projection of evil in presidential rhetoric as it articulates a primal motive for the global war on terrorism. The devil figure embedded in U.S. political culture and triggered by presidential war rhetoric empties democracy of its political content and transforms it into a virulent signifier. In this regard, George W. Bush's discourse is a manifestation of unresolved issues of national identity played out in a mythic ritual of redemptive violence. The unmet critical challenge, which begins with recognizing the mythic force of the archetype, is to reclaim or at least confound the rhetorical projection of this dark, demonic shadow if we hope to pursue a more democratic and less violent future. But has presidential rhetoric already regressed too far to entertain any realistic hope of achieving a healthier democratic culture? Stephen Hartnett and Jennifer Mercieca maintain that we have entered an era of deception, a post-rhetorical presidency that spells the death of democracy. This new dark age of anti-democratic imperial ambition reflected in George W. Bush's presidential discourse is cluttered with stupefying disinformation that confounds public deliberation. Indeed, Bushspeak constitutes a politics of fear and mendacity aided and abetted by corporate media, according to Douglas Kellner. Presidential leadership, as it operates through the discourse of a war on terror, is dangerously reduced to a manipulative spectacle. The consequences for democracy seemingly could not be worse. Mary Stuckey and Joshua Ritter scrutinize the ideological work of Bush's presidential rhetoric to argue that it undermines freedom and democracy in the very way it affirms human rights. The anti-democratic bent of this Orwellian effect is compounded in what Bryan Taylor diagnoses as a hypocritical rhetoric that touts American virtue by demonizing nuclear opponents. Moreover, a discourse of technological autonomy renders nuclear weapons themselves immune to public deliberation. The exigency of an open-ended war on terror evokes narratives of unitary executive power, Marouf Hasian, Jr. …

A Short History of French Literature by Sarah Kay , Terence Cave , Malcolm Bowie (review)

MLRj 100.2, 2005 517 L'Imaginaire du corps amoureux. By Marie-Pierre Andron. Paris: L'Harmattan. 2002. 258 pp. ?22. ISBN 2-7475-2901-0. In this study of the French Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy, Marie-Pierre Andron considers successively the body ofthe mother (obese, debilitated, prematurely aged), the body of the young woman (gracile for as long as it is chaste, constantly subject to almost intolerable temptations), the couple (in which the man conserves a youthfulness denied to his spouse, but is in many ways a negligible quantity, detectable mainly through his progeniture), and lastly those things (art and nature) through which carnal lusts may be sublimated, and which are often described by means of erotic imagery. Inevitably, the physical degeneration of (in particular) the female body has psychological consequences which are explored. A wealth of textual evidence is adduced from Roy's canon, unpublished and incomplete works, and Roy's autobio? graphical works. While this does display a consistent pattern of imagery and belief, it raises the question of who or what is being analysed: is it Roy herself? the oeuvre? or the individual works? The approach has something of psycho-criticism, but without much methodological reference to analysis. Andron claims to have recourse to diverse critical approaches and cites Anne Maurel (La Critique (Paris: Hachette Superieur ('Contours litteraires'), 1994), p. 59) to assert that one must have read everything by an author in order to understand the underlying themes of his/herwork (this is pretty much the whole methodology?how often have our students read everything of an author before writing about him/her?). Andron's reading is indeed compendious (as both the quotations and the bibliography attest), although in any given passage, a smaller number of works is foregrounded (Bonheur d'occasion and La Petite Poule d'eau in the discussion of motherhood, for example). However, when Roy's flirtation with a certain Stephen in the autobiographical La Detresse etVenchantementis brought into the argument, as ifit were a work of fiction, I feltthe distinction between psycho? analysis of Roy and the thematic study of the oeuvre was muddied. On the other hand, my own (possibly erroneous) view that Roy's canon contains one or two masterly works and a certain amount of lesser material had not enabled me hitherto to see with such clarity,in an author I had considered an innovative breaker with the rustic tradi? tion, a basically very Catholic world-view, in which intelligence is thin and chaste, and stupidity fat and fertile. It is clear which of these painful options Roy herself chose, but there is no comment on this. Nevertheless, this book offersan overview of Roy's ceuvre and a compelling catalogue of its underlying themes, as well as a tantalizing glimpse of some of Roy's unpublished work that should earn it a place in all libraries where Quebec and its literature are studied. Clearly the obese protective mother is a frequent and familiar figure in the literature of Quebec from both before and after Roy, and it would be interesting to extrapolate from this study to develop these links. Trinity College Dublin David Parris A Short History ofFrench Literature. By Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, and Malcolm Bowie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003. xii +344 pp. ?30. ISBN 0i9 -8i593i-5So many dictionaries, surveys, and panoramas of French literature are now available that it might well seem that, taken together, they write not its history but its obituary. Literature is not what it was, though it remains, as Barthes chillingly observed, 'ce qui s'enseigne'. For a generation, French as an academic discipline has been exchanging the study of the private imagination for the sociological analysis of contemporary public culture. History is becoming a thing ofthe past and the term 'literature' is pos? sibly now more widely understood to mean not the works of Racine or Flaubert but 518 Reviews the brochures that come with a new PC. This latest single-volume survey, a confident three-hander, swims bravely against the tide. It stands up for permanence, the craft of writing, and the pleasures of reading. Despite preliminary hesitations, the tradi? tional canon suffersonly minor adjustments and the implications...

L'Imaginaire du corps amoureux by Marie-Pierre Andron (review)

MLRj 100.2, 2005 517 L'Imaginaire du corps amoureux. By Marie-Pierre Andron. Paris: L'Harmattan. 2002. 258 pp. ?22. ISBN 2-7475-2901-0. In this study of the French Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy, Marie-Pierre Andron considers successively the body ofthe mother (obese, debilitated, prematurely aged), the body of the young woman (gracile for as long as it is chaste, constantly subject to almost intolerable temptations), the couple (in which the man conserves a youthfulness denied to his spouse, but is in many ways a negligible quantity, detectable mainly through his progeniture), and lastly those things (art and nature) through which carnal lusts may be sublimated, and which are often described by means of erotic imagery. Inevitably, the physical degeneration of (in particular) the female body has psychological consequences which are explored. A wealth of textual evidence is adduced from Roy's canon, unpublished and incomplete works, and Roy's autobio? graphical works. While this does display a consistent pattern of imagery and belief, it raises the question of who or what is being analysed: is it Roy herself? the oeuvre? or the individual works? The approach has something of psycho-criticism, but without much methodological reference to analysis. Andron claims to have recourse to diverse critical approaches and cites Anne Maurel (La Critique (Paris: Hachette Superieur ('Contours litteraires'), 1994), p. 59) to assert that one must have read everything by an author in order to understand the underlying themes of his/herwork (this is pretty much the whole methodology?how often have our students read everything of an author before writing about him/her?). Andron's reading is indeed compendious (as both the quotations and the bibliography attest), although in any given passage, a smaller number of works is foregrounded (Bonheur d'occasion and La Petite Poule d'eau in the discussion of motherhood, for example). However, when Roy's flirtation with a certain Stephen in the autobiographical La Detresse etVenchantementis brought into the argument, as ifit were a work of fiction, I feltthe distinction between psycho? analysis of Roy and the thematic study of the oeuvre was muddied. On the other hand, my own (possibly erroneous) view that Roy's canon contains one or two masterly works and a certain amount of lesser material had not enabled me hitherto to see with such clarity,in an author I had considered an innovative breaker with the rustic tradi? tion, a basically very Catholic world-view, in which intelligence is thin and chaste, and stupidity fat and fertile. It is clear which of these painful options Roy herself chose, but there is no comment on this. Nevertheless, this book offersan overview of Roy's ceuvre and a compelling catalogue of its underlying themes, as well as a tantalizing glimpse of some of Roy's unpublished work that should earn it a place in all libraries where Quebec and its literature are studied. Clearly the obese protective mother is a frequent and familiar figure in the literature of Quebec from both before and after Roy, and it would be interesting to extrapolate from this study to develop these links. Trinity College Dublin David Parris A Short History ofFrench Literature. By Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, and Malcolm Bowie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003. xii +344 pp. ?30. ISBN 0i9 -8i593i-5So many dictionaries, surveys, and panoramas of French literature are now available that it might well seem that, taken together, they write not its history but its obituary. Literature is not what it was, though it remains, as Barthes chillingly observed, 'ce qui s'enseigne'. For a generation, French as an academic discipline has been exchanging the study of the private imagination for the sociological analysis of contemporary public culture. History is becoming a thing ofthe past and the term 'literature' is pos? sibly now more widely understood to mean not the works of Racine or Flaubert but ...

Postmodern Literary Discourse and Contemporary Public Culture in Taiwan

With the increasing importance of Taiwan's role in the global economy and since martial law was lifted in 1987, a number of literary critics have tried to apply the term postmodernism to discussions of contemporary Taiwanese public culture. Often these critics singled out features that could be loosely defined as postmodern in terms of the fascinating, albeit unstable, mixture of speedy economic and political change, consumerism and multinational capital flows, the feminist and gay rights movements, cyberspace and counterdiscourse, new occult imaginary and alternative medicine, satellite TV and the transnational mediascape, call-in radio programs and semipublic spheres, interior design and the multiple layers of cultural bricolage, metafiction and generic hybridity, architectural doublecoding and the resurgence of traditional religious and moral beliefs, and the shifting identities in increasingly plural, though at times polarized, arenas, et cetera.1