Cultural Studies Tradition Research Articles

Between the lines: When culture, language and poetry meet in the classroom

Teaching poetry in second language (L2) classrooms raises theoretical and practical questions about how best to treat literature when target language and culture is also being negotiated. Current pedagogy derives from disparate sources, including the experientially-driven practices of individual teachers, the quantitative and qualitative research methodologies of Second Language Acquisition, and the aesthetic, historical, and philosophical traditions of literature and cultural studies. This paper surveys the knowledge base that shapes literature pedagogy, examines the conceptual implications of two common approaches (close reading and genre-based treatments), and argues for new teaching objectives.

Affect, Ethics, and the Imaginative Geographies of Permanent War: An Interview with Derek Gregory

Affect, Ethics, and the Imaginative Geographies of Permanent WarAn Interview with Derek Gregory Keith P. Feldman (bio), Anoop Mirpuri (bio), and Georgia M. Roberts (bio) As Foucault famously laments in The History of Sexuality, in "political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king."1 For Foucault, the figure of the sovereign, whose power is exercised as an exceptional prohibition of freedom, continues to organize the ways we attempt to intervene in the field of political power. As long as we continue to read power solely in terms of the juridical theory of sovereignty, Foucault argues, we will be unable to confront the mechanisms of exclusion and regulation that persist in the guise of formal equality and liberal humanism. But if we are to move our analyses beyond this theory that legitimates the institutions of political modernity, how then are we to conceptualize politics? Foucault suggests that the first task would be to invert Clausewitz's famous aphorism, "War is a continuation of politics by other means."2 That is, what it would mean to think of politics as permanent war? Of course, as Foucault readily admitted, he was far from the first thinker to pose the question of the utility of conceiving of history as constituted by the permanent roar of battles, or whether the language and tactics of war would be more effective in waging political struggle than simply pursuing legislative and normatively "political" institutional channels. However, what Foucault's suggestions bring to light is precisely the idea that rhetoric itself has long been viewed as a weapon in the battle. "Permanent war" in this way functions both as a historical discourse whose instrumental uses must be interrogated, as well as a present reality that gives us a way of analyzing, and intervening in, the political present. Or, as Foucault writes, historical knowledge "becomes an element of the struggle; it is both a description of struggles and a weapon in the struggle. History gave us the idea that we are at war; and we wage war through history."3 The research collective "Public Rhetorics and Permanent War"(PRPW) initially grew out of a series of conversations between graduate students at the University of Washington over this problematic that Foucault and many others have elaborated, conversations that tended to shuttle between the language of the academy and our own vernaculars.4 Versed in the traditions of Black British Cultural Studies, we have attempted to think about how popular cultural formations could serve as impetus for political activism, sites of commodification, and new methods of racialization that both disrupt and consolidate the social hierarchies of our present—a moment diagnosed across the political spectrum as one constituted by permanent war. Our imaginative geography for these processes of cultural intervention has been shaped by the long tradition of efforts to forge effective political formations in times of global crisis, efforts with transnational ambitions that have profoundly shaped the history of the 20th century—including, in particular, the legacies of anti-colonial movements and Black internationalist thought. Hence the concern of PRPW has been to generate conversations with the work of artists, performers, and activists whose audiences may not be situated within the confines of the university. If we are conventionally taught to view activists, artists, and scholars as figures doing socially critical work from within distinct spaces, we have attempted to stage the possibilities for articulation across these spaces. That is, we ask how different forms of cultural practice can be linked together through the proliferation of opportunities and rhetorical spaces emergent in late modernity, even with a complex awareness of the rhetorical and disciplinary gaps that normally cordon them off from one another. To that end, since 2005 PRPW has engaged these questions in a variety of sites and spaces, including graduate and faculty reading groups, undergraduate classes, a campus research cluster, a conference seminar, a number of works in progress by members of the collective, and a lecture series involving scholars, activists, and artists who have in some way been in dialogue with the problematic we had set forth at the start of this process. These have involved poet Suheir Hammad...

Editor's welcome, PORTAL, Vol. 5, No. 2, July 2008

This special issue of PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies is entitled ‘Italian Cultures: Writing Italian Cultural Studies in the World,’ guest edited by Ilaria Vanni (University of Technology Sydney). The issue aims at updating existing scholarship and scoping the proliferation of interests in the growing field of Italian cultural studies, whether conducted in Italy or outside that country. The issue proceeds from the premise that cultural studies practitioners write multiple Italies within Italy itself and from provincialized Italies, with a perspective that is both global and informed by specific local knowledge. As Vanni says in her introduction to the special issue, a number of questions arise when critics attempt both to imagine and work within the relatively recent field of Italian cultural studies: ‘Is there a specific genealogy to the study of cultures in Italy that intersects with the Anglophone definition of cultural studies? Is Italian cultural studies confined to cultural practices in Italy, or does it expand to include the cultural practices of the Italian diaspora? If there is an Italian cultural studies tradition, where is it? What do Italian cultural studies academics write about?' The contributions included here respond to such questions by drawing on a range of disciplinary and critical traditions to problematise received ideas about what Italy signifies and for whom.
 
 This issue of PORTAL also contains an essay and two cultural works in its cultural works section. ‘In the Age of Schizophrenia, Icebergs, and Things that Grip the Mind,’ from the Vietnam-based visual artist, curator, and writer, Sue Hajdú, is an evocative meditation on Saigon as represented in the work of five Vietnamese photographers— Ngo Dinh Truc, Lam Hieu Thuan, Nguyen Tuong Linh, Bui The Trung Nam, and Bui Huu Phuoc— who were born in the 1970s and whose work is reproduced by permission here. In her response to these young artists’ representations of contemporary Saigon, Hajdú notes how each photographer is inevitably grappling with the historically and nationally specific notion of contemporary Vietnamese time, ‘the monumental demarcation line’ signified by 1975. We also include in the cultural works section a suite of Spanish and English-language poems, ‘From/De Infernal : romantic,’ by Sydney based Vek Lewis, and a poem entitled ‘Mutiple Strokes’ by the Nigerian writer and critic, Obododimma Oha.
 
 Paul Allatson, Chair, PORTAL Editorial Committee

NRJ Book Reviews: Reading Tabloids: Tabloid Newspapers and Their Readers

Sofia Johansson, Reading Tabloids: Tabloid Newspapers and Their Readers, (Huddinge, Sweden: Sodertornhogskola, 2007). 195 pages, paperback.Review by Steven HallockOne of chief drawbacks of Sofia Johansson's entertaining and informative analysis of tabloid journalism is found in concluding statements of her study, which is based on her PhD dissertation. Discussing polarization in academia concerning the intellectual traditions of social theory and cultural studies, she complains that there is little qualitative research into how readers understand newspapers, even though this medium has a prominent place in theories about democracy and public sphere. This observation rather summarily dismisses decades of research, qualitative and quantitative analyses that do include anecdotal and narrative elements and that have been published in media and communications journals, periodicals and books.But more to point, author offers her study as a qualitative breakthrough in analysis of British tabloids, specifically Sun and Daily Mirror, when it actually is little more than anecdotal musings posing as qualitative research. This outcome stems from some basic flaws in her method, termed dialogic by author, that range from lack of random selection and a tiny sampling pool of focus groups and arbitrarily chosen interview subjects-she claims 55 readers overall-to a questionable process of determining publication time frames. While she claims to eschew quantitative method, she read a year's worth of both newspapers, from November 2002 to November 2003, with no apparent comparative format of common days or dates other than a representative week in November 2003-and with no explanation of why that month was chosen. This suggests that author used at least a partially quantitative method, which she calls textual analysis, but which resembles standard content analysis. Yet she apparently avoids formal coding, thus making replication and verification impossible.To her credit, Johansson makes no claim of generalization of her findings. She said she simply wanted to discern reader attitudes about and reactions to tabloid reportage aimed at a working-class audience and to use information obtained from questionnaire-guided focus groups and group interviews to offer some social and, at times, psychological commentary about them. Therefore, she terms her research in defining her purpose in introduction. She asks of tabloids, Why are they popular? What do readers make of them? As popular tabloids contribute to lives of over 15 million British newspaper readers, I am convinced that in order to get answers to these questions, readers need to be acknowledged as active producers of meaning. This book seeks to do so through presenting exploratory research with readers of tabloid newspapers.Beyond that, Johansson offers no explanation of why this research is important to field. While she draws on relevant theory such as uses and gratification and encoding-decoding, she ignores in her social science-laden literature review important media theory that deals with newspaper-reader relationships such as gatekeeping, schema, framing, perception and agenda-setting.The book does, however, have value. This value is found in nitty-gritty snatches of dialogue that Johansson shares with her readers, sections in which interview and focus group respondents acknowledge their political naivete in context of their social and economic class standing, discuss their enjoyment of sports and celebrity coverage, and their ambivalence about Sun's notorious Page 3 female nudity. …

Media events, globalization and cultural change: An introduction to the special issue

In 1992, the book Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz was published. Based on a number of preceding articles (Katz, 1980; Katz and Dayan, 1985; Katz, Dayan, and Motyl, 1981), the book conceptualized media events as a distinct area within media and communication research, an area that has to be investigated by crossing the empirical traditions of mass communication research and cultural studies. The ongoing relevance of this book is manifested by the simple fact that is still the main starting point for empirical media events research. Interestingly, Dayan and Katz did not define a media event as a certain incident that is covered by the media, but rather as a specific media genre. As such, this genre takes shape across eight points (Dayan and Katz, 1992). First, media events are an interruption of routine in broadcasting as well as in the everyday life of the audiences. Second, they monopolize the media coverage across different media channels. Third, media events are characterized by the fact that they are broadcasted live. Fourth, they are organized not by the media themselves1, but outside the media. Fifth, media events are pre-planned productions. Sixth, they are presented with reverence and ceremony. Seventh, the coverage of media events celebrates reconciliation. Eighth, they electrify wide audiences (such as a nation, several nations, or the world). Drawing on Max Weber’s (1972) three types of authority, within this genre of media events Dayan and Katz typified three basic scripts: the ‘contest’ (such as the Olympic Games and which focuses on the present in the sense of affirming existing rules), the ‘conquest’ (such the first step on the moon and which focuses on the future in the sense of changing existing rules) and the ‘coronation’ (such as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, although funerals also fall into this category, which focuses on the past in the sense of tradition-bound rules). These three scripts demonstrate the extent to which Dayan and Katz’s study has a special

Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination. By Jeffrey Geiger. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007. viii, 303 pp. $59.00, ISBN 978-0-8248-3066-3.)

The word Polynesia evokes images of lush, rich tropical islands but probably does not trigger, even in the minds of academics, thoughts of dense imperial and cultural relations with the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Jeffrey Geiger's compelling work suggests that while the first image may need to be problem-atized, scholars should also better understand the long and complex history of U.S. interactions with these Pacific islands. Geiger's introduction primarily outlines the key theoretical insights that inform his study. Most useful is his careful critique of scholarship that has focused on discourse and representation to such a degree that the give and take of imperial interactions has become lost. He is firmly within the cultural studies tradition, but historians of a more traditional bent will appreciate the skepticism with which he approaches overly broad applications of theory. Geiger then provides a lengthy chapter analyzing the literature produced in English (with some French and German) about Polynesia from the Enlightenment through the early twentieth century. The early part of the chapter, dedicated to how Enlightenment ideas shaped views of Polynesia, sometimes seems far from his central concerns but is important in establishing some of the sources of the contradictory and imperialist views of Europeans, and later Americans. Because the imperial encounter with Polynesia came relatively late, ideas about the area were formed at the same time that Europeans and Americans were struggling to delineate ideas about race, about the possible equality of all humans, and, to a lesser extent, about proper gender roles within the context of racial hierarchies.

Now you see it, now you don't: reconsidering the problem of representation

The article reconsiders the problem of representation. Processes of representation, it is argued, not only take place in the arena of official politics, but are also being conducted in other social arenas, albeit in different forms. In order to understand the problem of representation faced by contemporary democracy, we must thus develop alternative approaches that proceed from a broad view of politics, that place more emphasis on the symbolic dimensions of politics, and that scrutinize the borderlands between politics and culture. In this article, a framework for such an approach to representation is presented, building on the traditions of both political and cultural studies. According to the approach outlined, representation may be viewed not only as an institutionally constrained praxis, but also as more generally applicable symbolic–communicative practices.

Uma introdução aos Estudos Culturais

This work aims to present the tradition of cultural studies, especially those who begin in the study of theories of communication. Thus, it is necessary to traverse the trajectory of this tradition, its antecedents to the contours that this field of studies assumes in the present time. It should be noted that, at this moment, this incursion is only briefly outlined because of the initial purpose of this text, although numerous references are indicated that serve as clues to fill the gaps of this course.

El producto cultural: claves epistemológicas de su estudio

The Cultural approach to communication opens a broad interdisciplinary field that can be identified with the British Cultural Studies tradition. Mattelart has said that cultural studies have spread like wildfire to refer to its intromission into several academic fields. It is necessary to open the Pandora's box of cultural analysis, see the elements inside, and estimate if they are useful in exploring the activities of communication and the media product; a difficult project which, as I see it, should be started by defining the cultural product. In the following article I will try to conceptualize the epistemological keys of what we know and how we know it from a cultural perspective, and offer a theoretical frame to study the news as cultural product.

En rammefast filmskolekultur

Om dogmer på Den Danske Filmskole A firmly framed Film School Culture: About The dogma of The National Film School of DenmarkThis article is dealing with the fact that culture is not only something we can study through a tradition of cultural studies. In a much younger and less explored field we find a growing interest in studying the way culture is established in different organizations. I introduce theories from this field and employ The National Film School of Denmark as an illustration of an organization that has developed a certain kind of culture based on a mix between trust and restrictions. In explaining the use of restrictions further, I introduce and elaborate on the educational term ‘scaffolding’. Through the use of several levels of scaffolding – in the learning methods and in the way the Film School is organized – this organization has created an interesting culture that produces innovation in new Danish film. My point is elaborated with help from Barry Schwartz, an American psychologist and author of the book The Paradox of Choice (2004). His research and my article are helpful for understanding how the use of scaffolding can reduce stress and complexity and thereby produce good results within the culture of an organization like The National Film School of Denmark.

Merely Identity: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Sport

Some commentators have suggested that the embrace of “identity politics” has gone too far and that we are now in a putative postidentity moment. Within the academy this argument has been articulated from two divergent positions. The first derides identity politics as a move away from materialist concerns. The second, more conservative, position argues that identity politics is at fault for being over-political, for reading politics into every aspect of knowledge production. I argue that identity is in fact a necessary, although not sufficient, precondition for any effective oppositional politics. I further suggest that these arguments are themselves evidence of the articulation of (white, male, and heterosexual) institutional power within the academic field of (sport) sociology. As an alternative, I argue for the renewal of a critical public sport sociology that draws upon and extends the cultural studies tradition of committed and engaged scholarship.

Makt och motstånd i köpcentrumet

This article focuses how power and resistance are exercised in one of Stockholm’s biggest shopping centres. Power and resistance are key words in Cultural Studies. However, the tradition is dominated by studies where 'ordinary/common' people and their everyday resistance against economical, political and symbolic power is analysed. Critics of Cultural Studies have pointed out that this domination in some cases has led to a romanticized view on common people's resistance and an unproblematic, simplified concept of power. This article works in the tradition of Cultural Studies, but takes this critique seriously by distinguishing three arenas where economic, political and symbolical forms of power intersect and clash with other interests. These are located in the tension between three sets of relations: a) the shopping centre versus the local municipality, b) the centre management versus the individual businesses that run shops in the centre, and c) the shopping centre as a whole (comprising the owners, the shops and the space itself) versus the visitors (who are predominantly women). The empirical material consists of observations and field-notes, branch statistics, interviews with customers, shop employees and centre managers, photographic documentation, advertisements and other public sources from 1998 to 2002.

Narrating Injustice

As a theoretical starting point, this article suggests a shift from media-as-text to media object-as-utterance (in the sense of the term as worked out by Bakhtin and Voloshinov). This is done to move away from the production/consumption dichotomy, a framework on which most media studies analyses are predicated. From here, the story is told of Injustice, a documentary that found itself in unusual circumstances at the time of its release in Britain in July/ August 2001, with the local police attempting to block the screening of the film at various venues. Attempts to place this narration in relation to an existent cultural studies tradition of writing on the media lead us to consider relations of power/knowledge between British cultural studies and the media it comments on. In conclusion, this article attempts to set out a terrain within which a dialogic anthropology of media can work as a critical knowledge practice.

How place matters: unpacking technology and power in health and social care

The devolution of care into nontraditional community-based settings has led to a proliferation of sites for health and social care. Despite recent (re)formulations of 'evidence-based' approaches that stress the importance of optimizing interventions to best practice by taking into account the uniqueness of place, there is relatively little guidance in the literature and few attempts to systematically 'unpack' key dimensions of settings most relevant to policy, practice and research. In this paper, we explore how place matters for health and social care. In effect, we propose making place the lens through which to view practice, and not simply an interesting sideline focus. We focus specifically on (a) the emplacement of power relations in health and social care in and across settings; and (b) the pervasive (and often unrecognised) influence of technology on and in place (both 'mundane' and more visible 'high' technologies) as arguably among the most significant and pervasive (and often overlooked) dimensions of place pertinent to health and social care in both traditional (institutional) and nontraditional (community) settings. Drawing on diverse disciplinary literatures, we seek to make visible certain issues and bodies of work that health professionals may not be aware of, and which often remain inaccessible to practitioners and applied researchers on account of their density, complexity, and specialised terminology. In particular, drawing on the rich tradition of cultural studies, we advance the culture of place as a rubric for understanding the complex interrelationship between power, technology, culture, and place. Several fruitful avenues for place-sensitive research of health and social care practice (and its effects) are suggested.

Feminismo, estudios culturales y cultura popular

This paper explores the movement of feminism into academic life in general and the study of popular culture in particular. Assumptioms about the effects of popular culture on women had been a commonsense of second-wave feminism; however, by the mid-1970’s, questions about how gendered identities were culturally produced and reproduced became the topic of much more in-depth feminist research and discussion. This essay examines two main ways in which feminist research into popular culture entered academic life: first, it examines the “images of women” debate, and second, it examines the Cultural Studies tradition and the feminist cultural analysis.

More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form (review)

Reviewed by: More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form Derek A. Burrill (bio) More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form. Barry Atkins. Manchester: Manchester U. Press, 2003. Research, writing and theory on computer and video games is in a funny spot these days. As far as its viability as a discipline, it is bit like film studies in the late 1960's—the field has yet to find its central intellectual voices, its intrinsically situated methodologies. And, as far as the games themselves, they still suffer from a reputation as a medium that fails to offer something other than violent excess, time poorly spent, and antisocial grooming. Yes, we have Espen J. Aarseth's Cybertext, an important first incursion. And soon to come, The Journal of Game Studies, published by the University of Southern California, a journal devoted to the theory, history, and criticism of games. But, as a colleague of mine says, what we study is "visually rich, but as of yet, content poor." I am happy to say that Barry Atkins' new book, More Than a Game, shows that such games are worthy of study, particularly from the point of view of narratological analysis. Atkins sets out a clear and achievable task—to analyze the games as a form of fiction and map several individual games, or "texts," using the technique of close textual criticism. In this sense, his book is an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with computer or video games and how they can function as a type of literary interactive adventure. However, for those who are familiar with the field, this book can also function as a series of useful readings of several of the [End Page 382] most popular and analyzed games of the past decade. Regardless, his book, as an act of analysis, is probing, revealing and tempered. Before moving on to the details of the book, an important point to note is that Atkins, to his credit, has decided to use the term "computer game" instead of "video game," as he is, "interested in the multiplicity of utility . . . of the personal computer that sits on desks at home and at work, and particularly the ways in which this workhorse of labor in the early twenty-first century is where we read computer-based texts both for work and for fun" (20). Much of the current research on games does indeed focus on the visual and its relationship to other related media, particularly film, and for good reason. The growth and mutation of gaming and game culture has always been reciprocal to other media. So, in this sense, Atkins can be situated within what one might call the British Cultural Studies tradition, utilizing a clear, structured methodology and prose style while eschewing the theoretical posturing of poststructuralism or deconstruction. In this sense, this book could not be better realized. The book begins with the retelling of a significant gaming experience, where the author finds a certain sense of surprise at the relative complexity and polyvalency of Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far (1997), a WWII strategic wargame. Noticing the counterintuitive outcome of the game, Atkins is immediately plunged into a critical conundrum—as realistic (historically, visually, textually) as the game may have been rendered and experienced, he was still able to create an inauthentic result by changing the course of WWTI. He pushes this further: "Here was a form of fictional freedom: I could tell the story again and again and bring the story to a variety of conclusions. Here was a form of fictional restraint: I could only tell the story in a particular way. There really was something here that demanded further thought" (50). The chapters to follow focus on four games, their position in relation to the surrounding culture, and the mechanics of performing close textual analysis on something as resistant, slippery and "low-culture" as a computer game. Chapter II, "Fantastically Real: Reading Tomb Raider" is an expected chapter on a necessary, and unfortunately, over-analyzed game. Atkins' reading of the Tomb Raider series provides significant and useful information to those who have never played the game, and might pique the interest...

Changing the Channel

It is now generally acknowledged within the cultural studies tradition that media can actually be consumed in a mediated sense — that is, oppositionally and not hegemonically. 1 The viewer is no longer seen as powerless and ‘vulnerable to the agencies of commerce and ideology’, but rather as both selective and active. 2 Law students, as viewers, are constantly interpreting, transforming and producing meaning in relation to the images of law presented to them. They are utilising this process to not only make sense of the law, but also to analyse and reflect on their personal ideas and values in light of their understandings. Of course, as students of the law, they are expected to have (or to develop during their studies) some capacity for evaluating legal issues from a critical perspective. But what other uses could be made of such critical abilities in relation to their legal identity construction and how they view the role of lawyering in general? This article suggests that legal education should recognise the usefulness of pop cultural representations as a catalyst to stimulate our law students’ critical abilities, and makes suggestions of how best to harness them.3

Counter-Tribes, Global Protest and Carnivals of Reclamation

When Reclaim the Streets (RTS) activists passionately recount the first London events, as they have recently in Are Everywhere, by the Notes from Nowhere collective, they effectively recollect what became a template for popular in the emergent of movements. appearance in the mid 1990s of a global justice movement consisting of multitudes with a common grievance against neoliberalism suggests the presence of a single issue protest movement. issue, condensed as One No, Many Yeses, encompasses the entire planet, but is fought on multiple fronts, in variant guises, with diverse influences. And while commentators report that this anti-corporate globalisation movement has been stirred by such seemingly disparate events as the Zapatista uprising and Reclaim the Streets, it also appears that the anti-disciplinary counter-culturalism of an earlier period was getting a second wind. Indeed, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, slogans like We Are Everywhere and The Whole World Is Watching were being enthusiastically recycled. Something was happening here, again. And with the maturation of networked cultural politics, this time around it appeared truly global. While extensive comparisons with earlier movements cannot be undertaken here, this essay contributes to discussions of methods through which global anxieties are addressed and redressed in local acts of resistance. In particular it makes exploratory forays into the cultural politics of reclaiming (of land, culture, the internet, the commons, the streets), which appears to have obtained a zeitgeistUke grip upon those compelled to resist corporate globalization. proliferation of anti-corporate struggle necessitates the search for useful models through which to comprehend cultures of and youth activism. tradition of youth cultural studies provides us with little assistance in this regard. Attending to rituals of resistance and discrete subcultures, the theoretical developments emanating from Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) provide inappropriate heuristics for the comprehension of formations networked in opposition to corporate rule. semiotic and physical tactics of contemporary activism are not synonymous with symbolic or stylistic disruption, nor are they efforts at winning space from the parent culture for leisure and recreational pursuits. In his Profane Culture, Paul Willis identified how, for post-war working class youth, struggle was waged exclusively through lifestyle, and since stylistic transgression provided no real solution to their subordinate structural position, style was the tragic limit of working class cultural politics. While style—a desire for cutting-edge or hardcore transgres-

‘Blüthenstaub‘: Rezeption und Wirkung des Werkes von Novalis ed. by Herbert Uerlings, and: Novalis: Das Werk und seine Editoren ed. by Gabriele Rommel (review)

1042 Reviews What does Honold tell us about Holderlin? The firstchapter afterthe introduction unearths a new source from which Holderlin informed himself about the excavations at Olympia, so that the knowledge he displays in Hyperion can be called 'state of the art'. The next chapter concerns firstthe Olympic ideal of athletic contest (or agon) and its impact, via Rousseau's Emile, on Holderlin and the German pedagogical reform? ers. The chief text is again Hyperion, though there are now references to a number of poems. The textual evidence for the presence of the agon ideal in Hyperion is rather slender, and rests on careful readings of a few passages. (There unfortunately seems to be no evidence that Holderlin ever applied his Rousseauite ideals in his activity as a Hofmeister.) This second chapter also explores the sexual ramifications ofthe Olympic ideal ofthe beautiful male body, and how this ideal gives rise to tensions in Hyperion, especially in the relation between the hero and Alabanda. Honold here gestures to? wards a comprehensive interpretation ofthe novel, based on some ideas ofWolf Kittler and Peter Sloterdijk, but, given the book's odd style,this interpretation is leftundeveloped . In the last chapter, the focus is on Holderlin's late unfinished hymn 'Der Ister', and revolves around some inevitably speculative arguments about its connection to the myth of the foundation of the Olympic Games by Hercules. The interpretation, we learn, is also to be presented in a forthcoming article in the Holderlin-Jahrbuch. Honold's subject, however, extends beyond Holderlin to the entire range of (not only German) philhellenism, down to the 1936 Olympics and the architecture ofthe Langemarck-Halle, where lines from Holderlin appear in glorification of the dead of 1914. Hence the archaeology chapter contains sixteen pages on the excavation of Olympia after Holderlin's time, and the next one a discussion of Coubertin's revival ofthe Olympic Games, which were inspired, Honold tells us, by the Bayreuth Festival and by English public schools. The book thus fails into the tradition of Cultural Studies, with both its trademark interest in institutions and its floating methodology. On the positive side, this method embeds the study of texts in a wider study of a nation's culture, and it is able, as here, to provide a showcase for vast erudition, ranging from standard themes to an exploration of the most offbeat learning. But the method's disadvantage is the vagueness of focus, even whimsicality. The decon? struction of the distinction between text and context seems to have given a licence for infinite digression. For all Honold's indefatigable research and the ingenuity of his interpretations, it remains to be seen whether a book written in such a mannered, occasionally pretentious, style will be able to make a lasting contribution to its subject. Queen's University, Canada David Pugh 'Bliithenstaub': Rezeption und Wirkung des Werkes von Novalis. Ed. by Herbert Uerlings. (Schriften der Internationalen Novalis-Gesellschaft, 3) Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2000. viii + 432pp. ?60. ISBN 3-484-10827-4 (hbk). Novalis: Das Werkund seine Editor en. Ed. by Gabriele Rommel. Halle: Forschungsstatte fiir Friihromantik und Novalis-Museum SchloB Oberwiederstedt. 2001. 271pp. ?25.56. ISBN 3-9805484-6-5. The firstof these two weighty volumes contains the proceedings of the third interna? tional Novalis conference, held in 1999. Eighteen papers apply the convenient pollen metaphor to the task of evaluating what others have made of Novalis's writings, in three main groups: literary reception in Germany and abroad from late Romanticism to classical modernism and postmodernity; Novalis's reception by cultural interest groups such as Roman Catholicism and anthroposophy; and his reception of and in music and the finearts. As is almost always the case with such collections, the achieve? ment is mixed. The literarystrands inevitably dominate. Within them, explorations of MLRy 98.4, 2003 1043 Novalis's relation to broadly modernist writers (Musil, Hofmannsthal, Trakl, Jiinger, Seghers, Hilbig, Benn, Bachmann, and others) far outweigh the rest, followed by the postmoderns (Derrida, Strauss, Bernhard) and at a distance the solitary late Ro? mantic Heine, with the non-Germanophones (English and American, Italian, Polish, Russian) forming their own category. Here we acquire plenty of new information. Herbert Uerlings, in one...

Plural conceptions of social justice: implications for policy sociology

Concern with multi-faceted or ‘plural’ conceptions of justice has grown within policy sociology. This paper briefly summarizes some of the dimensions and facets of such plural models and considers their implications for policy sociology. Three implications, in particular, are considered. It is suggested that: first, plural models of justice substantially enlarge the agenda of evaluation; second, tensions within and between different facets of justice need to be acknowledged and responded to; and third, plural models entail a collapse of the distinction between evaluation and action. The paper argues that the latter two implications are frequently overlooked in policy sociology, particularly in work with a dominant focus on critiquing educational and social reproduction in a style the paper labels ‘sociology from above’. By contrast, the paper discusses examples of scholarship that meet the challenges of plural models — scholarship that has more in common with the cultural studies tradition. In so doing, the paper indicates the importance of a ‘sociology of just practices’, and a modified ‘reflective equilibrium’ approach is identified as one means of developing such a sociology.