Cultural Criticism Research Articles

The Right to Sit Still

In this essay, Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece considers how criticism, spectatorship, and the markers of the procedural overlap in a contemporary moment where leisure has been ceded to work. By reading across multiple objects, from MovieTok film and television reviews and YouTube video essays, to prestige film and television, to Marxist provocations, to cultural criticism, this essay argues that simply looking at media has been replaced by an obsessive drive toward content creation. Because watchers in late capitalism are encouraged always to produce and never to sit still, the liberatory potential of spectatorship has rapidly eroded into a race to treat every film and television show as a puzzle to be decoded rather than a mystery of ultimately unsolvable contemplation.

Art education as a culture ambassador of Ukraine’s formation space

In the context of Russia’s current war against Ukraine, the need for the European world to disseminate systematic knowledge about the culture and art of Ukraine, which for a long time has been considered by Europeans exclusively in the context of the culture of the aggressor country, is becoming more urgent. Thus, it is crucial to distinguish Ukrainian culture/mentality and restore and strengthen Ukraine’s positive image on the world stage, in particular, by promoting the identity of Ukrainian culture. The purpose of the research is to identify and substantiate the priorities of personal and professional development of a socially responsible subject of cultural and artistic diplomacy in Ukraine, based on the value of national art education, which can reveal/form humanity in a person. The study used the methods of analysis, synthesis, deduction, comparison, and abstraction. The scientific value of the research results lies in an updated understanding of the professional formation of the subject of cultural diplomacy – a cultural ambassador who meets the needs of the modern world community for a new vision and new motivation for the system of training artistic and creative personnel. First of all, a trinity of such basic directions as developing a case of new knowledge that will determine the creative potential of art education in the processes of democratisation of Ukrainian society; justifying the feasibility of creating strategies of dialogue through respect for the Other; refuting the arguments introduced by authoritarian systems that tend to produce hybrid war hysteria. The study reveals the importance of training artists as cultural ambassadors to establish the true significance of Ukraine’s culture at the international level and identifies ways to improve the image of the state through the implementation of effective art education. The conclusions of the study will be useful for scholars in an in-depth study of the concept of “cultural diplomacy”, as well as for politicians and cultural critics in choosing approaches to restoring a positive emotional colouring of the image of Ukraine in the world public consciousness through Ukrainian culture and art.

The Literary Poetics of the Authoritarian Face of Power

This paper examines two Modern Greek novels and discusses the imposition of authoritarianism and punitive mechanisms applied in two different political situations. The first of these concerns an authoritarian regime that commits atrocities against dissidents while the second examines the power relations that develop in left-wing organizations in Greece, result in criminal violence and ultimately mirror the authoritarian methods used by those in power. These texts demonstrate authoritarianism may be engendered in any political organization, regardless of ideology. The paper utilizes the theoretical principles of Cultural Criticism together with literary narrative techniques.

Maradona’s death in Argentine media landscape: from class consciousness to group consciousness? A theoretical proposal to overcome conceptual nostalgia

ABSTRACT This article analyses certain Argentine media landscape’s reception of worldwide football star Diego Maradona’s death, on 25 November 2020. I focused on one specific national media (the left-wing or social-democrat journal Página/12) to scrutinize how certain both male and female writers and intellectuals depict Maradona, write about his football prowess and personal affairs, praise and remembers him. The underlying hypothesis of my article is that the perception – in that aforementioned coverage – of Maradona as a class consciousness holder because of his poor background and upbringing in the Fiorito shantytown is an example of conceptual nostalgia, while actually both his professional career and personal life are better graspable through the category of group consciousness. To deepen this theoretical disquisition, I draw upon the contributions of Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács and English Cultural Critic Mark Fisher.

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.

The Problems of Negative Systematic Significance in Al-Ghathami's Practice Cultural Criticism - A Deconstructive Reading in the Distortion of Quotation and the Mechanisms of Adapting it between Contradiction, Play, and Organic Unity.

يعتمد الدكتور عبدالله الغذّاميّ في نقده الثقافيّ على مجموعة من الأسس النظريّة والمفاهيم الاصطلاحيّة. وربّما يكون مفهوم الدّلالة النّسقيّة أهمَّ هذه المفاهيم؛ فهو الركيزة الرئيسة التي يقيم عليها الغذّاميّ جُلَّ مشروعه الثقافيّ. وقد حاول البحث دراسة تلك الّدلالة النّسقيّة، لتبيينِ بعض الجوانب الإشكاليّة التي تعتريها في تجلّياتها وتطبيقاتها ضمن ممارسة الدكتور الغذّاميّ نقدَه الثقافيَّ. واهتمّ البحث بثلاثة جوانب إشكاليّة؛ هي: إشكال التّناقض المنطقيّ، وإشكال اللعب المنهجيّ، وإشكال كسر الوحدة العضويّة أو خلخلتها. وتبيّن من دراسة هذه الإشكالات أنّ خطاب الغذّاميّ يعاني العيوب النّسقيّة ذاتها التي عاب عليها الثقافة العربيّة، أي إنّ النقد الثقافيّ مصاب بالعيوب نفسها التي جاء ليكشفَها ويحذّرنا منها. كما تبيّنَ – أيضاً- أنّ نقد الغذّاميّ يعتمد على الفكرة أساساً يبني عليه نقده وتحليله، والفكرة عنده تُولَّد قبل التّحليل، ولا تكون نتيجةً تاليةً له؛ فهي الغاية وهي الموضوع، وتتمثّل في النّسق المضمر ودلالته النسقيّة، التي يريد صاحب أطروحة النّقد الثّقافيّ أن يؤكّد وجودَها ويثبتَ فاعليّتها، فيبحثَ في النّصوص عن شواهدَ لها؛ وعليه، فهذه العيوب والإشكالات سواء أكانت في خطاب الغذّاميّ أم في الثقافة، هي عيوب عضويّة طبيعيّة نابعة من جنس الكتابة ومن طبيعة تكوينها؛ فلا داعي للخوف منها وتهويل خطرها. فالفكر يفرّق بين الجماليّ الخياليّ، والثقافيّ الواقعيّ، ولا يخلط بينهما كما ذهب إلى ذلك نقدُ الدكتور الغذّاميّ وتوهّم حصوله. وتكمن أهميّة هذا البحث الذي يدخل ضمن إطار نقد النّقد في الكشف عن بعض الجوانب الإشكاليّة التي لم تأخذ حقّها الكافي من البحث والنقد، في مشروعٍ يُعدّ واحداً من أهمّ المشاريع الفكريّة والنقديّة في حاضر الثقافة العربيّة؛ وقد اعتمد البحث على آليّات القراءة التّفكيكيّة، منهجاً نقديّاً يُشرِّح به مادّته المتمثّلة في نتاج الدّكتور عبدالله الغذّاميّ.

Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World, written by Nouri Gana

Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World, written by Nouri Gana

Falsificación y literatura. La levedad del escritor múltiple: el caso de Bolívar Coronado

The counterfeit works of Rafael Bolívar Coronado (1884–1924) represent a phenomenon with unusual repercussions on critical reception. This author managed to publish more than twelve volumes with false authorship and content, from “crónicas de Indias” to collections of poetry. This article presents a theoretical approach regarding literary falsification in general and highlights the concepts of lightness and multiplicity to propose an interpretation of the Bolívar Coronado case. This paper also deals with the artistic dimension of literary forgeries as creative works that use the same methods and strategies as fiction writing. The set of falsified works by this author can be interpreted as a conceptual proposal that questions the functioning of the literary field of his time. Likewise, his proposal can also be framed within the cultural criticism that the forgery tradition entails: it questions not only the difficult discernment between the concepts of truth and lies, but also the rigidity of some guardians of cultural institutions and the system of legitimation, awards, and literary reviews.

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.

Gaming [the] Systems: Critical Analysis through Tabletop Roleplaying Games in Humanities Classrooms

In its very designation, “role play” contains a productive tension: the expectations bound up in roles and the liberating potentiality of play. It comes as no surprise, then, that role play has found expression in the worlds of business, therapy, education, and even the military. Table-top games exist as our culture’s most familiar form of role play but among its least theorized. In this paper, I examine the rich potential of table-top role-playing games in humanities classrooms as a means to fuel cultural critique, critical analysis, class discussion, and self-reflection. My paper lays out a theoretical structure for analyzing games as multi-dimensional texts and a practical guide for bringing them into the classroom. In particular, I look at two free-to-access and permissively concise game systems which can easily fit into an open week of coursework. The games, “Lasers and Feelings” and “The Deep Forest,” depart from the cultural expectations of “Dungeons & Dragons” to rethink, adapt, and challenge our understanding of issues ranging from the formulation of the rational, Western subject to the politics of post-colonialism. I supplement conventional process-oriented pedagogy with Ian Bogost’s “Persuasive Games” and C. Thai Nguyen’s “Games: Agency as Art,” to establish a robust groundwork for students to analyze and critique how game design decisions make arguments about the world. Furthermore, in playing the games in the classroom and debriefing afterwards, students identify their internal systems that reflect and inform their own assumptions about the world.

The Kindle™ as Necker Cube

The early decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed various attempts by cultural critics to move beyond the Two Cultures divide posited by C.P. Snow in 1959 , developing modes of critique that seek to bridge the gap between humans and the technology we use. This has resulted in relational interpretations of literature and technology that emphasise the interpenetrative nature of the reading experience, and the complex implications of conceiving of literature and technology as a system. Amazon's Kindle™ ebook reader provides an exceptional use case to ground this conversation, occupying a position somewhere between traditional reading device and techno-corporate publishing mechanism. Analyses of the Kindle™ often fail to take into account useful twentieth-century approaches to the philosophy of technology that offer purchase over the problem domain, however. Work by John Dewey (1859–1952) and Donald Ihde (1934–2024) suggest ways to conceive of the Kindle™ and similar devices as objects embedded in our experience of the world, mediated by technological systems and infrastructure but ultimately contributing to our experience of the world in much the same way as previous modes of publishing.

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.

The Perception of F.M. Dostoevsky’s “Demons” Novel in Soviet Culture of the 1930-ies.

This is the fi rst one of the small seri4s of articles devoted to the history and peculiarities of the perception of the “Demons” novel by F.M. Dostoevsky in Soviet culture, ideology and literary criticism in the 1930s. The author assumes that in general the attitude towards Dostoevsky in those years was noticeably tougher in comparison t6o that in the 1920s. For the emerging Soviet culture in the 1930s Dostoevsky became more and more persona non grata. Both publishing of his works and the scientifi c research of his creative legacy were cut down. The ideological toughening was specifi cally directed against his most famous anti-revolutionary and anti-nihilistic novel - “Demons”. The author of the article especially focuses his attention on the famous attempt “Demons” mono edition by “Academia” publishing house, the total print run of which was withdrawn and destroyed after the pejorative campaign in the press

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