De Certeau Research Articles

Walking in New York City and Lagos: Spatial memory in Teju Cole’s novels

ABSTRACT In Teju Cole’s novels Every Day Is for the Thief (2007, 2014) and Open City (2011), big city life is explored from the perspective of narrators who are outsiders to the cities they describe. They thus give rather distanced, journalistic reports about their experiences. Both novels convey their meaning via spatio-temporal conceptions that I analyze with the help of urban theories by Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. The narrator of Open City learns to uncover spatial memory by walking the streets of New York City – spatial memory lays bare the painful source of his emotional detachment and ultimately forces him to acknowledge a crime he committed in the past. The narrator of Every Day Is for the Thief at first seems to engage in a more conventional recovery of submerged childhood memory but then also explores the specific relationship between space and memory.

The Dark Side of Comedy

The Dark Side of Comedy

Антропологическая практика как невозможная возможность

A contemporary man is now more and more recognizing the necessity of the anthropological practice of the art of being himself. The main sphere of the research conducted in social science and the humanities in the second half of the 20th – the beginning of the 21st centuries was dedicated to problematization, apology, assertion and exercises related to practices of the self. The topic of the anthropological practices (social, spiritual, psychological, somatic, and art practices) permeates the works by E. Fromm, L. Binswanger, P. Ricoeur, P. Hadot, M. de Certeau, M. Foucault, V. Bibikhin, Yu. Lotman, S. Averintsev, and S. Khoruzhy. Reaching the level of the anthropological practices is seen in this article as salvation from alienation, loneliness, and violence as a “second breath” for a better and more dignified life. However, together with the expansion of the topic of the anthropological practices, the comprehension of their multiplicity and multidimensionality we are faced with the arising problem of the impossibility of these practices, their fragility and excessiveness. The originality of this paper lies in the research of the problem of the impossible possibility of the anthropological practices, their fragility and excessiveness. Consequently, we can acknowledge that the problematics of the anthropological practices has an antinomic character and the “resolution” of the problems is possible within the bounds of an existential event on the edge between its possibility and impossibility. It’s also important to consider that the anthropological practices facilitate the self-renewal of the social, the transcendence of alienation, and the transformation of everything that is impersonal towards a man and fallen away from him. The social as the human can begin, be initiated, and realized but it cannot last forever, it is temporary, event-bound and situation-bound, and principally heteronomous.

Tactics of dwelling: alterity and the room in Tender Buttons

ABSTRACT This article investigates the problem of dwelling in Gertrude Stein’s collection of prose poems Tender Buttons. Though Stein’s innovative language and depiction of objects and alterity have long been the focus of a scholarly investigation, rarely have critics investigated how Stein’s objects relate to each other, and how her poetic language intervenes on the literary construction of spatial relationships. Drawing principally on Martin Heidegger and Michel de Certeau, this paper investigates Stein’s employment of a tactical approach to dwelling.

O espetáculo da escola em movimento: conversas sensíveis, temas invisibilizados e corpos pulsantes

Este artigo trata-se de um recorte na pesquisa de Mestrado em Educação (CANSI, 2019), centrada na perspectiva dos Estudos com os Cotidianos e referenciada, principalmente, nos trabalhos acadêmicos de Nilda Alves (2015; 2017), Nívea Andrade (2011) e Michel de Certeau (2014). A pesquisa foi realizada com um grupo de dança de uma Escola Municipal, no estado do Espírito Santo, no Brasil, adotando como metodologia conversas com os praticantes do grupo, com a intenção de analisar os movimentos plurais de artes e/ou inventividades presentes na escola. As conversas permitem perceber as potencialidades existentes nos processos de ‘teoriapráticateoria’ e os caminhos incertos e potentes produzidos nesses encontros. Portanto, este artigo discute os conhecimentos em redes que ocorrem nas práticas de ‘aprenderensinar’ tecidas na escola, como a proposta de contribuir para o campo da educação, em busca de uma reflexão sobre a possibilidade do currículo em rede como um “caminho possível” (ANDRADE, 2014) dentro da escola.

Resisting Patriarchal Cultures: The Case of Female Spanish Home-Based Teleworkers

This article explores the role of resistance as a micro-political practice carried out by female Spanish teleworkers. Drawing on a qualitative study focused on female workers in different cities in Spain, we conceive telework as a labour logic in which resistance is the cornerstone of meaning and subjectivity creation. Micro-practices of resistance are analysed following de Certeau’s notion of tactics and strategies, honing in on the limitations, restrictions, problems and difficulties faced by female teleworkers as they try to balance the different dimensions of their lives, namely family, work and everyday activities. The accounts given by the participants in our study reveal key tactics which ultimately serve to denounce prevailing work ideologies that uphold the patriarchy and promote false flexibility. These tactics allow teleworkers to define a subjectivity in which motherhood and telework are both absolutely relevant.

Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500. Edited by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+581.

<i>Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500</i>. Edited by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+581.

Thinking through Place on the Early Modern English Stage. Andrew Bozio. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xi+213.

<i>Thinking through Place on the Early Modern English Stage</i>. Andrew Bozio. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xi+213.

La mística como síntoma de la modernidad. Una lectura del proyecto epistemológico de Michel de Certeau

This article presents an enquiry into one aspect of Michel de Certeau’s intellectual project: to make Christianity intelligible in our epistemological situation. I seek to demonstrate how this epistemological and theological question shapes many of his historical and anthropological works, which seek to elucidate the re-composition of the human sciences and Christianity from a particular reading of modernity. The matrix of his thought is configured by the irruption of mystical experience in otherness and strangeness and the questions this poses to the claimed uniqueness modern reason, heir to the Aufklärung. We will inquire about the fundamental theoretical tools that support the political discernment made by Michel de Certeau in the cultural crisis of May 68. Then we analyse the place of the nominalist rupture in the process of desontologization of language and the passage from the religious system to the ethics of Enlightenment as a way through the notion of “the formality of practices”. Both are preludes to his particular reading of secularization.

Critical Spatial Practices: A Trans-scalar Study of Chinese Hutongs and American Alleyways

Across time and cultures, the built environment has been fundamentally shaped by forces of occupancy, obsolescence, and change. In an era of increasing political uncertainty and ecological decline, contemporary design practices must respond with critical actions that envision more collaborative and sustainable futures. The concept of critical spatial practice, introduced by architectural historian Jane Rendell, builds on Walter Benjamin and the late 20th century theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to propose multi-disciplinary design practices that more effectively address contemporary spatial complexities. These theoretical frameworks operate through trans-scalar means to resituate the built environment as a nexus of flows, atmospheres, and narratives (Rendell, 2010). Assuming an analogous relationship to the contemporary city, critical spatial practices traverse space and time to engage issues of migration, informality, globalisation, heterotopia, and ecology. This essay documents an interdisciplinary academic design studio that employed critical spatial practices to study correspondences between Chinese and American cities. Here, the notions of urban and interior are relational. Urbanism and interior spaces are viewed as intertwined aspects in the historical development of Beijing hutongs and Cincinnati alleyways. These hybrid exterior-interior civic spaces create sheltered public worlds and socio-spatial conditions that nurture people and culture.

Sainthood as Selfhood: The Dramatic Art of Becoming Holy

Sainthood as Selfhood:The Dramatic Art of Becoming Holy Jennifer Newsome Martin (bio) I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decreeBitter would have me taste: my taste was me;Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I seeThe lost are like this, and their scourge to beAs I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.1 In the first volume of his The Mystic Fable, Michel de Certeau, SJ, suggests that saints and mystics have complicated the longstanding Delphic injunction of the Western tradition—"know thyself"—by posing to it two further questions: "Who else lives inside of you?" and "To whom do you speak?"2 Thus, for the self so conceived by de Certeau, A problematic of being and consciousness is rerouted from the onset toward illocution, that is, toward a dialogal structure of alteration—"you are the other of yourself." The soul becomes the place in which that separation of the self from itself prompts a hospitality . . . that makes room for the other. And because that "other" is infinite, the soul is an infinite space in which to enter and receive visitors.3 Similarly, Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, known for a strong emphasis on what he dubs a "metaphysics of the saints,"4 wrote that "the saints are lost in [End Page 5] the depths of God, they are hidden in him. Their perfection grows not around the center of their ego, but solely around the center of God, whose inconceivable and incalculable grace it is to make his creature freer in himself and for himself to the extent that he becomes freer for God alone."5 For Balthasar, then, as with de Certeau, the saint is the figure who gets gradually refigured into a holy, dialogal subject who, as with the central metaphor of Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, contains nearly infinite multitudes, for whom the inner life becomes a rich warren of unexplored terrain and who indeed houses the infinite God in "a reciprocal indwelling that lies beyond all imagination."6 Even casual readers of St. John Henry Newman will think of that classic formula, which emerged from his 1816 inward conversion, wherein he comes to experience himself henceforth as "two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my creator."7 This realization was so tremendously radical that Newman identifies, though likely hyperbolically, a dramatic break between "the identity of the boy before and after August 1816."8 As Louis Bouyer [End Page 6] describes Newman's growing consciousness of himself in and after this inner spiritual conversion at age fifteen, "this 'self,' so adamant in its nature, was suddenly projected into the 'self' of that Other and became wholly obedient to Him."9 Newman's sense of self-reliance was thus exchanged with a sense of the interior presence of the divine Other, a sense of presence that on Newman's telling never waned. This sense of duality also comes to bear on Newman's various ruminations on the dictates of personal conscience, especially in Callista wherein the eponymous character speaks of conscience decisively as "the echo of a person speaking to me."10 What is curious is that even as Newman identifies from an early age this plurality and porosity and ever-saintly displacement of the self, at the same time and from the same early age it could be said that he also evinces a peculiar preoccupation with the self. This preoccupation is particularly noticeable, perhaps, in his scrupulous care to archive, narrate, edit, and preserve testaments to the self in such media as school notebooks, scraps of papers salvaged from his boyhood, or the production and subsequent preservation of his letters. He was "a confirmed hoarder" of "every kind of article that had a personal bearing . . . he treasured these possessions, just because they formed, as it were, an extension of his personality."11 Moreover, his autobiographical writings witness to a profound sensitivity to what he perceived as his own hyperbolic self-consciousness; his Anglican sermons sound the tone again and again to look not to the self but...

The Narrative Tactics of Chaucer's Monk

ABSTRACT Recent criticism on Chaucer's Monk often reads the Monk through discourses of subjectivity. Working from Michel de Certeau's theory of the tactic, this article argues that the Monk should best be understood not as a subject but as a rhetorical representation of the monastic estate, and that his tale should be read as an affective (and effective) rhetorical weapon against that estate's enemies, the noble Knight and the civic-elite Host who is also the governor of the game. By deploying tragedies, which take the noble estate as their subject, the Monk shows how the monastic estate's forms of possession, especially collection, position it to be better able than the nobility to maintain its grasp on wealth in the face of chance. The monastic habit of patience becomes an effective tactic for dealing with the pain of fortune.

History’s Time

The article maintains that the so-called temporal turn that has recently taken hold in the theory of history expands the subject matter of academic historiography (allow- ing it to include the previously little-studied ways of experiencing and ordering time during the eras that preceded the institutionalization of historical knowledge and the formation of classical historicism’s linear temporality), while also eliciting questions about its practical purpose and “the use and abuse of history in life.” The author sug- gests using Michel de Certeau’s idea from the 1980s of repoliticizing historiography as a way to gain insight into this topic. The author finds that repoliticization adopted as a research strategy can be deployed in two modes: a) as a critique of professional historiography’s ambition to obtain maximally objective knowledge about a past which is considered fundamen- tally different from the present and incompatible with it; and b) as a special practice- oriented philosophy of history, which is to be called “radical historicism.” In the first use of repoliticization, the criticism is along the lines of studying the “practical past” as Hayden White advocated in his book of that title, the last one to be published before his death. In it he exposed the antagonism between the historical past that is created by professional historians and the practical past that is available to any- one without exception. The author proposes his own approach to the concept of rad- ical historicism, inspired by Mark Bevir’s writings as well as by the ideas of a number of famous Marxist thinkers and theorists of radical democracy. Generally speaking, radical historicism holds to a contingent ontology of the historical event (its radical novelty) and a rejection of the present state of affairs (in which the historian lives) as a “natural” or “legitimate” configuration of historical forces and processes.

DAILY PRACTICES AND PROCESSES OF TERRITORIALIZATION OF SETTLERS IN QUERÊNCIA DO NORTE, PARANÁ, BRAZIL

ABSTRACT Purpose: To understand the processes of territorialization in the daily life and work routine of settlers in Querência do Norte, Paraná, Brazil. Originality/value: This work contributes to the context of discussions on territory and territorialization processes (Haesbaert, 2011; Raffestin, 1993, 2008; Saquet, 2008) in the daily life (De Certeau, 2014) of workers marginalized by society in general. Design/methodology/approach: We developed this qualitative article from data collected through eight life history interviews with settlers, pre-settlers, and residents of Querência do Norte, in the State of Paraná (PR). After transcribing the interviews, they went through an analysis of narratives. Findings: We identify that, through the practices of work, study and claims, the settlers territorialize the space, and there they create their own rules and norms of coexistence. In their struggles for land, it is clear that their place of belonging is the field, justifying the insistence on the struggle for the right to land to cultivate. The sense of belonging of the workers is represented by the struggle that unites them and places them as part of a larger movement. Placing men at the center of the construction of territoriality is accomplished through the daily struggle and work of the settlers and pre-settlers in Querência do Norte (PR).

ВИЗУАЛЬНОСТЬ ГОРОДА В ВЫСОТНОЙ ФОТОГРАФИИ РУФЕРОВ

The article examines the representation of the city in rooftopping photography. Methodologically, the research is based on A. Lefebvre’s concept of social space, and also M. de Certeau’s concept of spatial practices as agents of its production. The principal notions in this analytical framework employed in the article are the urban imaginary and the gaze in constructivist understanding, which not only reflects, but also forms the object of vision. Rooftopping photography is considered in the context of the history of the view of the city from above, which has become an important factor in the urban imagination. The expansion of rooftopping photography into the public space and the presentation of cities is associated with the development of new communication and optical representation technologies in the 2010s. The analysis of the rooftoppers’ visualizing of the city carried out in semantic, aesthetic and rhetorical aspects revealed its substantive and aesthetic qualities. Rooftoppers photos capture the moment when a person faces the city as a whole. The city converges with natural and landscape objects. In the night panoramas that make up the bulk of roofer photography, the city is represented as a space of energy flows. In rhetorical terms, in contrast to the metonymy of a promenade, roofer photography is metaphorical. In general, it is concluded that the subject of rooftopper photography is not so much the identity of the city as its universal urban beginning embodied in the centers of the world’s megalopolises. Following D. Nye and his interpreters, the aesthetic mode of the city in roofer visuality is interpreted as urban version of the sublime.

Cyprus dispute: Between contested territories and spontaneous reappropriation.

This paper discusses the concepts of conflict and border in relation to place and identity reflecting on narratives and meanings of dividing urban and civil borders. It takes the divided Greek and Turkish society living in Nicosia as a case study. The significance of the wall, as an explicit expression of division, is discussed but also overturned by looking at its closure and its permeability when Nicosia’s sealed borders opened again for everyday crossing. The inquiry speculates an alternative path informed by Glissant’s concept of Opacity, Agamben and Nancy’s non-essentialist approaches non-community to look at entangled deep-rooted ethnic divisions and fragments of shared cultures. To inform urban epistemology, two bottom-up examples are analysed using De Certeau’s concepts of everyday life: Home for Cooperation, which is a neutral space in the buffer zone for unified collectively and Occupy Buffer-zone Movement, which has occupied a non-place and transformed it into a public square through grassroots activism. The paper highlights that in order to draw a feasible future of Cyprus, an anti-essentialist acceptance of the multiple and eclectic origins of the context is needed. In this sense, the tangible and intangible meaning of division requires a shift of meaning, from delimitation, classification, separation to a porous element of balance and calibration. The top-down urban models and concept of inclusiveness have been shaken by the temporal civic grassroots communities, and this demonstrates that collective participation fosters the reappropriation of public space, overturning the perception and the experience of the border of differences. This contributes to theorizing a critical and reflective,rather than idealistic, practice of participation in urban design.

Vernacular culture, city, architecture: analysis and correlation of concepts

The article is devoted to structuring the existing definitions of three key concepts within modern vernacular cultural studies in order to build a holistic picture of understanding the vernacular elements in urban space. Within the definition of vernacular culture (M. Lantis, A. Markusen, J. Carr and L. Servon), characteristics such as the combination of traditional culture and modern aspects of cultural identity in the non-professional dimension of city life were identified. Within the definition of the concept of vernacular city (J. Krase and T. Shortell, S. Sapu and others) the appeal to the discourse of everyday (G. Simmel, H. Lefebvre, M. de Certeau, R. Sennett and M. Blonsky) and the method of visual semiotics (R. Jakobson) is analyzed in order to distinguish signs of visual representation and urban identity, social and cultural conditions in the construction of urban space by its inhabitants. The concept of vernacular architecture (R. Brown and D. Maudlin, H. Guillaud, M. Salman) carries a combination of elements of traditional and everyday within postmodern and postcolonial studies and the concept of "collage city", as well as through the prism of the problem of sustainability.

The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday by Woojeong Joo

Reviewed by: The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday by Woojeong Joo Michael Raine The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday. By Woojeong Joo. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. 288 pages. ISBN: 9780748696321 (hardcover, also available as softcover and e-book). Japanese cinema is not as central to film studies as it once was, but there is wide agreement among critics and filmmakers on the importance of Ozu Yasujirō. Highly acclaimed—with brief eclipses—in Japan over his thirty-five-year career, Ozu is now universally regarded as one of the great cinematic auteurs. In the 2012 version of the decennial Sight and Sound poll of world film directors, Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari; 1953) was ranked as the best film ever made, and in the parallel critics' poll Ozu was the only director with two films in the top twenty. He is celebrated especially for his postwar films that focus on quiet crises in the Japanese family, using a restricted style and exhibiting an immediately identifiable sensibility that has been termed "Ozuesque."1 Beyond that critical agreement, what is striking about Ozu studies is the diversity of approaches to the director's work and the variety of stances toward cinema as a medium ascribed to him. Initially regarded as a "new age film guy" (shin jidai no eigaman) in Japan, he was soon positioned on the leading edge of studio-based social realism, and then in the postwar years, for better or for worse, as Japan's "most Japanese" film director. After the early triumph of Tokyo Story, which won the first Sutherland Trophy for the best film shown at the National Film Theatre in London in 1958, Ozu's reputation abroad was established by major retrospectives in Berlin and [End Page 430] London in 1963 and in New York in 1964 and 1972. Paul Schrader published an extended account of Ozu's Zen-influenced "transcendental style" in 1972. This was followed in 1974 by the first monograph on Ozu in a Western language, written by Donald Richie, who had curated both New York retrospectives. Since then, Ozu has been the topos of various battles in film studies: Jonathan Rosenbaum's critique of Schrader and Richie, drawing on Noël Burch's formalist analysis of Ozu, was criticized for its insufficient rigor by David Bordwell, whose Wisconsin school appreciation of Ozu's modernism was attacked by writers at the journal Screen, and so on.2 Most scholarship in Japan has been more concerned with establishing Ozu's biography, filmography, and bibliography: Ozu's life, films, and much of his journalism have been catalogued by Tanaka Masasumi, Chiba Nobuo, and others.3 One text that stands out is Hasumi Shigehiko's Kantoku Ozu Yasujirō (Director Ozu Yasujirō), first published in 1983, which opened a portal between Japanese and Western Ozu studies when it was translated into French in 1998. Hasumi's influential brand of film criticism is based on the immediate encounter of an active critic with the materiality of the moving image, what Hasumi calls "dynamic visual acuity" (dōtai shiryoku). It is less an evaluation of the filmmaker—though being closely observed and insightful, it is that as well—than it is another chance to repudiate cinema as a medium of representation.4 In a similar manner, Gilles Deleuze has discussed Ozu's films to illustrate his philosophy of time.5 One of the pleasures of Joo's The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday is a kind of lowering of the stakes. It steps away from the formalist arguments that dominated much of the discussion in the 1980s and from the philosophical speculations that have proliferated more recently. While drawing on Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto to map the different discursive positions on Ozu's style (traditional or modern) and politics (reactionary or radical), Joo identifies his own interest as a sociohistorical study of Ozu's films as a medium for reflecting on what Tosaka Jun called "actuality" (p. 28). This approach echoes the "cultural turn" in film and area studies of more recent authors such as Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, drawing on urban theorists Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to specify the central concerns...

"A veces quisiera volver": Racialization, Ruins, and Migrant Tactics in Oswaldo Estrada's Short Stories

"A veces quisiera volver":Racialization, Ruins, and Migrant Tactics in Oswaldo Estrada's Short Stories Christian Elguera Estoy como las aves que no hallan dónde hacer el nido —Oswaldo Estrada, Las guerras perdidas (109) Peruvian migrant writing continues to grow in the United States today. Anthologies, literary competitions, and publishing houses such as Sudaquia or Suburbano Ediciones have forged a literary system beyond the geographic limits of Peru.1 Time and again, authors such as Melissa Rivero, in The Affairs of the Falcón's (2019), describe the cultural experiences and economic struggles of Peruvian migrant characters in American neighborhoods. Peruvian-American author Daniel Alarcón is known for his treatment of Peruvian migration in several of his works. His recent short-story collection, The King is Always Above the People (2017), presents migrants from various sociopolitical angles: at times depicted as marginal subjects, as in "The Ballad of Rocky Rontal," or as a means to reflect on universal matters such as solitude and melancholy, as we see in "The Auroras." Other Peruvian writers prefer to depict one specific type of migrant: the intellectual who travels to the United States to pursue a graduate degree or to continue a literary career. This is something [End Page 177] that we see in several works, including the recent anthology Cuentos de ida y vuelta. 17 narradores peruanos en Estados Unidos (2019), edited by Luis Hernán Castañeda and Carlos Villacorta, where most of the texts focus on Peruvian migrants from middle or upper social classes. Within this context, I consider that Peruvian-American writer Oswaldo Estrada represents migration from below, describing the racialization, ruination, and survival tactics of Peruvian, Mexican, and Central American migrants in their new environments. Estrada's short stories reveal the numerous difficulties and abuses that these newcomers experience in the United States. He also examines how migrants employ day-to-day resistance to affirm their presence in a society that refuses to recognize their cultures and identities. Between the ruins and the illusions of migration, the author portrays migrant scenes from the inside rather than as defined by intellectual or exotic predicates. Two of Estrada's short-story collections, Luces de emergencia (2019) and Las locas ilusiones (2020), shift our attention to the migrant struggles for dignity and respect, describing their practices of solidarity, their use of humor to heal wounds, and their tactics (à la de Certeau) for negotiating rights in contexts of racial prejudice and social inequality. Estrada has acknowledged his migrant origins throughout his extensive academic production. His edited volume, Senderos de violencia (2015), for example, is dedicated to his family: "Para mi hermano Omar, porque juntos vivimos estas y otras violencias … Y para nuestra madre, por librarnos de ellas …" (7). Along these lines, in an essay titled "Traducir la violencia: soñadores e inmigrantes en la narrativa fronteriza de Daniel Alarcón", he states: por pertenecer a la ola migratoria de los ochenta y los noventa causada en parte por el conflicto armado entre Sendero Luminoso y el Ejército Peruano, reconozco en los personajes de Alarcón las ganas de llegar a un mundo 'mejor', lejos de la violencia, la hiperinflación, el desempleo y la inestabilidad política, aunque el costo sea habitar un espacio de perenne extranjería y extrañamiento. (218–19) These and other statements help us recognize recurrent topics in Estrada's literary universe: migration, violence, the challenges faced by Latin American women within patriarchal societies, and the detrimental consequences of Peru's internal armed conflict.2 The titles of these books of fiction a priori connect to the atmosphere of Estrada's short stories. Luces de emergencia explores how migrants and other characters live in a world of constant danger and ongoing atrocities. Las locas ilusiones, on the other hand, evokes the famous Peruvian song "El provinciano", by Luis Abanto Morales. The first line of the song states: "Las locas ilusiones me sacaron de mi pueblo", referring to the nostalgia experienced by Andean migrants in the city [End Page 178] of Lima. Following Gérard Genette's ideas on intertextuality (10), I would argue that Estrada's work reflects the migrant journey described in the...

Yaşamın Çevrimiçi Okulu: Alain de Botton'un ‘The School of Life’ Oluşumunun Strateji ve Taktik Olarak Analizi

Through a critical engagement with the literature on the conceptualizations of culture, this article focuses on the possibilities for empowerment and social agency that may be found in manifestations of everyday popular culture and the critiques of this approach that voice their oppressive nature. The article draws on Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics, as qualified by Michel Foucault’s use of the same conceptual pair, in order to develop a conceptual grid that emphasizes their imbrication or mutual conditioning. The key advantage offered by this grid is that it makes visible the inherently ambivalent nature of cultural products and the way in which constraining strategies and liberating tactical reversals are both made possible on the same shared site. It thus argues that popular cultural works may subvert the manipulative imperatives of the culture industry only from within a strategically structured social field. It thereby becomes possible to acknowledge the insights of the culture industry perspective of critical theory, while providing a more nuanced interpretation and evaluation of certain works of popular culture. The conceptual analysis is then applied to The School of Life (an online educational organization initiated by the popular author, philosopher, and entrepreneur Alain de Botton) both to offer an examination of this cultural artifact and to test the assumptions the theoretical framework developed.