Cultural Criticism Research Articles

The Reconstruction of the Mythical Image of Satyavati in Kavita Kane’s The Fisher Queen’s Dynasty

Indian myth as it is represented in Indian literature and how cultural myth criticism is employed to evaluate the text

Four corners of the unsettling: the more-than-uncanniness of consumer culture

ABSTRACT Although consumer culture has been studied extensively for its propagation of comforting signs, symbols, and experiences that reassure us of our selves and other marketable fictions, it is also conducive to unsettling effects and affects, many of which are unintended, undesired, and unavailable for introspection. Departing from Freud’s theory of the uncanny and borrowing from commentaries by cultural critics Mark Fisher and Adam Kotsko, we diagnose the unsettling’s relationship with four affective-experiential categories which contribute to its hybrid makeup: the weird, the eerie, the creepy, and the awkward. Drawing upon a phenomenological rubric of presence–absence, we characterise the weird as competing co-presences which disturb the borders between things; the eerie as absence of the expected or presence of the unexpected; the creepy as excess presence; and the awkward as excess absence. These “four corners of the unsettling” provide an alternative perspective on the discomforting character of consumer culture.

Multimodal Autoethnographic Sincerity

ABSTRACT Critically departing from theories of autoethnography, diaspora, and multimodality, this article introduces “multimodal autoethnographic sincerity,” which I define as a critical communication method that puts the researcher’s affective feelings in conversation with their mediated productions of culture. I use multimodal autoethnographic sincerity to further produce knowledge on an ethnographic film, which I filmed in my father’s provincial hometown Kalibo, Philippines. The new autoethnographic cultural critique I contribute to my film’s diasporic inquiries is a mapping of the festival’s transnational analysis against my affective feelings within my own Filipinx evolving body. I demonstrate the heuristic and generative capacities of a multimodal autoethnographic sincerity that makes multiple communication modes (diasporic body, homeland, cultural critique, filmmaking, and writing) in my knowledge production an ongoing intersubjective inquiry into the Philippines, colonialism, and the legacies of U.S. Empire. Ultimately, multimodal autoethnographic sincerity allows researchers to conceive of and methodologically examine diasporic identity as a relational process versus a racial and ethnic essentialism in today’s mobile condition of diasporic peoples.

Interested Gazes and Invisible Audiences: Judicial Narratives on Sex Work

The dominant paradigm in Indian legal review is doctrinal and empirical. However, judgements of the Supreme Court of India are often couched in rhetoric and literary sources. In this regard, the law and literature paradigm has created different interpretive tools, including law as literature and literature in law. These are the tools that I utilise to explore how sex work is understood and how the ideal sex worker is conceptualised by the judges of India. Judgements on sex work are particularly conducive to a law and literature analysis as in these cases, the courts are called upon to justify legal rationality, forcing them to draw upon popular morality, best reflected in persuasive literature. Judicial dicta in four cases that have come before the Supreme Court over the span of half a century (1964–2012) are analysed to provide a cultural critique of the post-colonial and neoliberal sensibilities that underlie judicial discourses.

A Study on the Structure of Feeling in Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor

Raymond Williams (1921-1988), one of the most influential Marxist cultural critics in the 20th century, proposed the concept of “structures of feeling” to reproduce the social psychology and emotional experience of people from an era. The structures of feeling are most conspicuous during social transformation and implicit in literary works of the same period. This paper intends to examine Charlotte Bronte’s novel The Professor with Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling” theory to find out the conflict and contradiction between the real feelings of the characters in the novel and the dominant cultural characteristics, as well as the author’s solution strategy — the magic formula, and to uncover the participation of literary works in British empire construction.

On the criticism of culture as a value

Speech in the publication of A.P. Ogurtsov talks about the contemporary understanding of culture by M. Heidegger, which testifies to the spiritual fall of the world and the replacement of the concept of “spirit” with the concept of “culture” in a specific meaning — as a value, which Heidegger considers “the highest sacrilege”, because God appears among the values. This understanding of culture is associated with “the secularization of thought and the oblivion of being; value thinking is rooted in the will to power”. It is significant that in our time it is not uncommon to understand culture as a value.

The Rules of the Game in Carlos Reygadas’s “Serenghetti”


 
 
 At first glance, Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas’ Serenghetti (2009) appears to be a documentary, capturing nothing more than an amateur women’s soccer match filmed in Santo Domingo Ocotitlán (Morelos, Mexico). Commentary on the film has focused on social issues such as urban development, anthropocentrism, and sport as spectacle. This essay, however, argues that Serenghetti is much more interested in examining the aesthetic dimension of cinema, or what Reygadas calls the film’s “fiction.” In some respects, Serenghetti recalls Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), as both movies record complete soccer matches. But where Gordon and Parreno’s film engages, as Michael Fried contends, with the issue of absorption in contemporary art, this essay suggests that Reygadas’s film is concerned with contesting an anti-representational account of cinema, particularly the question of time, which has been central to how slow cinema scholarship has understood his work. Indeed, since his Cannes award-winning film Japón (2001), Reygadas’ films have been labeled as slow cinema—films that are understood less as a representation of time than as what Thiago de Luca calls “duration itself.” This essay proposes that through the concept of the soccer game, Serenghetti not only asserts itself as fiction but also, in doing so, provides a reading of cinematic time that challenges many political and aesthetic fantasies endorsed by contemporary cultural criticism.
 
 

Corporate crime and conspiracy in contemporary television: Power, profits and paranoia

Television’s status as a medium that is firmly regulated and at times derided as a ‘vast wasteland’ suggests that it is not necessarily the place in which to find cultural critiques. Yet, such a viewpoint is ahistorical; whether operating on a public service or commercial model, both UK and US television share a significant history of series – both sitcoms and dramas – which offered both occasional and sustained criticisms of the products and results of a corporate culture that only grew stronger throughout the twentieth century. In this article, we not only introduce the Special Issue ‘Corporate Crime and Conspiracy in Contemporary Television’, but offer an overview of both UK and US television, from their earliest forays to contemporary shows, that have addressed corporations’ bad behaviour across decades and genres.

MARXISM AND AMOR INTELLECTUALIS: TOWARD A THEORY OF SOCIALIST CULTURE BY VOLODYMYR YURYNETS

The paper analyzes the methodological framework of the philosophy of culture and new literary criticism of the Ukrainian philosopher and literary critic Volodymyr Yurynets (1891—1937) within his article “To the Problem of Socialist Culture (Introduction to the book ‘Mykola Bazhan’).” His ideas testify to the powerful methodological searches in the field of Marxist criticism of the 1920s aimed at substantiating the nature of post-revolutionary culture. Balancing between Marxism and Western idealist philosophy, Yurynets brings elements of the latter into his philosophical Marxist criticism.
 While elaborating a model of new criticism, Yurynets substantiates perception based on a “fluxion of intellectual sympathy.” In this process, the recipient becomes an organ of “amor intellectualis, indifferent amazement.” Yurynets considers his philosophical criticism of culture to be a Marxist form of cultural philosophy. He asserts that literature is a form of philosophical thinking and argues that literary criticism armed with philosophy is a phenomenon completely different from academic literary criticism. Justifying philosophical criticism as an active and modeling force of the modern time, Yurynets appeals to the ideas of the literary critic Leonid Grossman, the literary theorist Pavel Medvedev, and the linguist Nikolai Marr. Yurynets’s concept comes down to the search for the meaning of art in relation to the “life world” of a man. At the same time, he interprets the discovery of the “living forces of the epoch” in the context of historical materialism. In an effort to purify aesthetic perception from subjectivity, psychology, and emotion, Yurynets actually adapts E. Husserl’s ‘phenomenological reduction’ and applies it to the aesthetic reception. The scholar also refers to reflexology and Freudian psychoanalysis as sources of artistic inspiration and interpretive ideas for contemporary philosophical criticism.

Catholic Pastoral and Prophetic Responses to a Secularizing Landscape

The purpose of this article is to offer a retrieval of some major themes in the writings of Ro­mano Guardini and Ivan Illich, two twentieth century Catholic priests who responded to secularization in ways that could be described as both pastoral and prophetic. Guardini tended towards a more pas­toral emphasis, while Illich’s stance was more prophetic. Guardini exemplified a Catholic way to bridge the gap often experienced between faith, life and culture. Illich demonstrated how a Catholic can ad­dress their culture in a way that is both challenging and fertile and does so in penetrating observations about contemporary secular professions and preoccupations. The article has three parts. In part one, I sketch a range of responses to Christianity that have emerged in an increasingly secular culture, as well as the types of response that Christians have made to such a culture. In parts two and three a repre­sentative sample of the writings of Guardini and Illich is drawn on and analysed, together with a range of secondary literature on Guardini and Illich, in order to explain the nature and the role of four key themes (in each case) within their overall outlook. For Guardini, in part two, these are Catholic worldview, lit­urgy, providence and cultural critique. For Illich, in part three, I examine his notion of the mission of the Church, his treatment of schooling, his understanding that modernity is a perversion of Christianity, and his advocacy of friendship as a healing and liberating mode of engaging the world

FandangObon: Amplification, counter‐publics, and fugitive spaces of belonging in Los Angeles

AbstractThe festive celebration known as FandangObon is made possible by workshops and satellite performances that artivistas (art activists) stage throughout the year in a variety of community venues. The event transforms the annual Japanese American Buddhist Obon ceremony honoring ancestors into an antiracist polycultural performance. Through improvisation and invention, colorfully adorned participants blend the dances, songs, and costumes of the Japanese bon odori circle with Mexican son jarocho fandango practices and West African ballet and egungun drum and dance circles. Each of the groups represented in FandangObon brings to the mix its own form of circle dancing, collective singing, and instrument playing, yet bon odori, fandango, and egungun do not fuse together seamlessly in these gatherings. Instead they coalesce as a conversation among equals in which each tradition remains faithful to itself in the process of making changes through engagement with others The concepts of amplification, counterpublics, and fugitive spaces of belonging serve in this article as central interpretive frames of a cultural critique of the historical and cultural conditions for the celebration's emergence, articulation, and implementation (Marcus and Fischer 1986).

Between the secret state and the public sphere: the writer as intermediary

ABSTRACT This essay explores the unique roles played by writers as intermediaries between the secret state and the public sphere, providing an introduction to the special issue Writers in Intelligence. Though frequently remarked upon, the history, nature, and politics of this relationship remains under-studied. Some spies-turned-writers write in the hope of legitimizing a problematic role, others to own their own identities in a police state. For some, writing is an avenue for critique of a toxic security culture, while others have lent their skills to intelligence agencies as a form of patriotic duty. We examine how fictional representations of intelligence work have been both a boon and a hindrance to various secret services; and how exposing elements of intelligence work can occasionally lead to conspiracy rather than clarity.

Technocratic totalitarianism: Gunnar Kaiser and dissident discourse in pandemic-era Germany

This article examines the ideas, reception and social role of Germany’s most prominent cultural critic of lockdown politics, Gunnar Kaiser. In contrast to the majority of European intellectuals, Kaiser took an early public stand against the naive adoption of science as a social authority and the unprecedented overturning of core democratic principles. He argued that without vigorous, open debate, the worldwide state of emergency threatened to usher in a fundamentally new (bio)political era, in which liberal democracy would be replaced by an increasingly totalitarian technocracy. Yet despite his voluminous philosophical output, which included a highly creative and increasingly professionalised YouTube channel as well as two best-selling books, Kaiser found himself largely excluded from mainstream German discourse. Crew analyses the full range of Kaiser’s interventions while also situating him within the broader landscape of European dissent.

المضمر والظاهر في رواية حجاب العروس للروائي محمد الحمراني مقاربة في التاريخانية الجديدة

تقوم أطروحة التاريخانية الجديدة في هذا البحث على مقاربة الخطاب السردي في رواية (حجاب العروس) للروائي محمد الحمراني التي كتبت بعد الاحتلال الأمريكي للعراق في التاسع من نيسان عام 2003،والبحث في كيفية دخول آثار الماضي وتصوراته إلى الثقافة المعاصرة، وصولا إلى إدراك العمل الأدبي ضمن سياقه التاريخي، ومن ثمّ تأويل شفرات النص السردي، وممارسة الأعمال الحفرية للإمساك بالأنصاف الثقافية الكامنة في النص الجمالي، هذه الأنساق التي تتستر في النص الروائي في أثناء تصويره المتخيل للواقع تصويرا من وجهة نظر معينة قد تتفق مع الأحداث التاريخية وقد تختلف فيها؛ لذا سيعمل البحث على تقويض الخطابات المركزية السائدة في النص الجمالي للكشف عن جزء الجبل الجليدي الغاطس في خطابات النص.
     البحث مقسم على قسمين: الأوّل مهاد نظري، وفيه التمييز بين النقد التاريخاني التقليدي والنقد التاريخاني الجديد، ومدى اشتراك الأخير مع النقد الثقافي، أمّا الثاني فيتضمن مقاربة للنص الروائي الذي بُنيَ عليه البحث

On the Aesthetics and Politics of Neoconservatism in Postwar Japan and America

ABSTRACT This article explores the aesthetic and political dimensions of neoconservative thought in postwar Japan and America. Although neoconservatism today is most often associated with hawkish foreign policy positions and the mythos of American hegemony, it first emerged in the realm of 1960s and post-1960s cultural criticism, much of which was composed by right-of-center literary intellectuals in particular. This article explores how in that earlier context, one of the most distinctive models for answering the cultural questions that motivated the emergence of neoconservatism as an article of global thought appeared in a body of writing centered on Japan. Putting the ideas expressed by the noted American neoconservatives Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz into dialogue with the writings of the conservative Japanese literary critic Etō Jun, the ruminations on Japanese cultural conservatism by the American scholar of Japanese literature Edward Seidensticker, the memoirs of the Sony CEO Morita Akio and the former Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzō, and the writings of the noted Japanese neoconservative novelist-turned-politician Ishihara Shintarō, the article argues that the articulation of neoconservative ideals in postwar Japan ultimately provided a model to conservative market advocates worldwide for how to integrate the seemingly incompatible logics of community and capitalism through a cultural synthesis.

Picaros and shapeshifters: the postcolonial picaresque style in GauZ’s Standing Heavy

I read GauZ’s Standing Heavy in connection with the postcolonial picaresque style, as GauZ’s Ivorian immigrant characters are robust survivors who see through the French system and criticize it through their anti-idealist viewpoints. This cynical view, often disclosed through roguish language, provides the author the possibility of expressing aggression toward the unfair system and highlighting the characters’ need to find their agency within its unequal structures. Meanwhile, the publisher’s marketing techniques and the author’s media appearances have contributed to the novel’s great success on the literary market; however, I argue that the novel’s success on the market should not diminish our understanding of its cultural criticism. Instead, the author himself may act as a shapeshifter in the competitive cultural marketplace, since his engagement in strategies of self-exotism exposes our sanctimonious need as readers to expect authenticity from African authors in Western contexts when they have to conform to Western codes.

Francis Lee’s Period Film Ammonite: An Exploration of Gender, Class, and Sexuality

Ammonite (2020) is loosely based on the life of Mary Anning (1799–1847), a palaeontologist in England. The film captures her struggles as she drudges by the seaside to collect fossils that were appropriated by the male scientists who claimed her relics as their own. Her stormy relationship with Charlotte Murchison, an upper-class woman, posits the chief ideas that the film explores- class, gender, and sexuality. Lee’s story resurrects the unacknowledged achievements of Mary Anning in a patriarchal society and adds an LGBTQ dimension through their passionate erotic relationship. It is a reimagination based on the lives of two women who were ignored by the male-centric scientific community of the nineteenth century. The study critiques discrimination against women, class differentiation and the institution of marriage. It underscores the role of cinema as a cultural text to reveal how such practices have existed through centuries of exploitation and marginalization by those in positions of power. As a storytelling medium, cinema can transport audiences into a different historical time frame and give an alternate perspective to challenge the status quo. The paper examines how Ammonite addresses pressing issues of class and gender and offers a cultural critique through the aesthetic use of images, sound, and narrative. The film has been evaluated through Feminist Theory, Media Studies, and Queer Theory to establish how Lee’s film presents alternative paradigms favouring inclusivity and representation of the less privileged.

Francis Lee’s Period Film Ammonite: An Exploration of Gender, Class, and Sexuality

Ammonite (2020) is loosely based on the life of Mary Anning (1799–1847), a palaeontologist in England. The film captures her struggles as she drudges by the seaside to collect fossils that were appropriated by the male scientists who claimed her relics as their own. Her stormy relationship with Charlotte Murchison, an upper-class woman, posits the chief ideas that the film explores- class, gender, and sexuality. Lee’s story resurrects the unacknowledged achievements of Mary Anning in a patriarchal society and adds an LGBTQ dimension through their passionate erotic relationship. It is a reimagination based on the lives of two women who were ignored by the male-centric scientific community of the nineteenth century. The study critiques discrimination against women, class differentiation and the institution of marriage. It underscores the role of cinema as a cultural text to reveal how such practices have existed through centuries of exploitation and marginalization by those in positions of power. As a storytelling medium, cinema can transport audiences into a different historical time frame and give an alternate perspective to challenge the status quo. The paper examines how Ammonite addresses pressing issues of class and gender and offers a cultural critique through the aesthetic use of images, sound, and narrative. The film has been evaluated through Feminist Theory, Media Studies, and Queer Theory to establish how Lee’s film presents alternative paradigms favouring inclusivity and representation of the less privileged.

ІСТОРИЧНА НАУКА В ТВОРЧОСТІ І. ФРАНКА: ІСТОРІОГРАФІЧНИЙ ДИСКУРС

The article is devoted to the study of the role of the prominent Ukrainian writer, philosopher and public figure Ivan Franko in historical science. It considers the works of historians, philosophers, literary scholars, and cultural critics of various fields: scientific, popular science, fiction, criticism, etc. as historiographical sources. The publications of Ivan Franko’s contemporaries, researchers of the Ukrainian PCP, independent Ukraine, and the Ukrainian diaspora are analyzed. The strengths and weaknesses of each group of historiographical sources are highlighted: access to sources of researchers in Ukraine; national principles and the lack of an ideological component of diaspora historiography; the class approach of Soviet scholars; new opportunities for researching the historical scientific achievements of Ivan Franko in the period of independent Ukraine. The creative heritage of the scientist is considered as an organic combination of historical themes, the principle of historicism with literary and artistic means of their coverage, development of his own view of the world historical process and Ukraine’s place in it. The author analyzes the main stages and directions of his scientific research, which reflect the evolution of historical consciousness and scientific approaches in his work. The article analyzes the works of Ivan Franko, which are characterized by a deep analysis of historical events, political changes and cultural development, as well as the impact of these studies on the development of Ukrainian historiography and the formation of national historical consciousness. The article examines Ivan Franko’s contribution to the development of historical science and his creation of a foundation for further research in this field. The study allows us to better understand the influence of Ivan Franko on the development of historical research and highlights the importance of his scientific development for modern historical science.

Estudio crítico del pensamiento ilustrado a la industria cultural: desde la perspectiva de Adorno

Abstract: The purpose of this article has been to promote culture by criticizing the cultural industry. Enlightenment thought played an essential role in performing the function of cultural criticism and promoting the creative transformation of human survival through criticism towards the generation of a new subject. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify the essential significance of Adorno’s critical theory of the cultural industry when discussing the criticism of Enlightenment thought towards the cultural industry. This article attempted to reinterpret the criticism of the cultural industry by introducing Enlightenment thoughts, recognizing that Enlightenment thought was not entirely harmonious but contained completely different ways of understanding. These two distinct understandings and their contradictions can dialectically co-exist in future historical development processes, and the criticism of the cultural industry can play an important role in promoting cultural construction.