Discursive Web Research Articles

O Conselho de Comunicação Social como símbolo da luta pela participação no debate regulatório em Comunicação

This article discusses the Social Communication Council, linked to the Federal Senate, as a symbol of the search for greater social participation in decision-making processes in the field of communication, as a collegiate body in clear dispute for space, definition and continuity since its creation. From the Political Economy of Communication and the Anthropology of State processes, the council is understood as a place of representative listening to civil society since the 1988 constituent. Through a documentary ethnography of the body's archives, we seek problematize the representation of civil society and follow the discursive web around the collegiate itself, aiming to problematize its representative structure, power asymmetries perceived and consider its capacity and scope of action.

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

DISCUSSÕES SOBRE O DISPOSITIVO DA SEXUALIDADE: OS CURSOS DE PEDAGOGIA LICENCIATURA SOB ANÁLISE

This article has the objective to analyze the discursive web that constitutes disciplines that approach elements of sexuality devices, which are allocated in the curriculum of Undergraduate Pedagogy courses offered in Brazilian federal universities. It assumes a post-structuralist perspective under Foucault’s studies and their intersections with studies of gender and sexuality as the theoretical perspective. The methodology operates with the practice of problematization as it scours the courses syllabuses and evidence that Undergraduate Pedagogy stands out as a privileged course for such discussions, allocating disciplines that set into operation ways of approaching gender and sexuality topics in order to establish teachers whose knowledge is recognized and authorized to act in the conduction of gender and sexuality debate, pointing out important acting strategies of the sexuality device, which increasingly highlight these discussions in contemporary times.Keywords: Gender. Sexuality. Undergraduate pedagogy. Academic disciplines.

Mau Mau as Method

AbstractDuring the period of the Kenya Emergency (1952–1960), an assemblage of anticolonial forces waged war against the British colonial apparatus and its allies. Their notoriety would be crystallized in a single, enigmatic phrase: “Mau Mau.” Through considering the character of both contemporary and current framings, this article contends that Mau Mau exists as a historical method in itself, rather than simply as a phenomenon subjected to the analytical frameworks of historians. Mau Mau’s mythological dimension—something acknowledged in even its earliest formal studies—has rarely been focused upon in any sustained way that centers its implications for historical methodology. Yet it existed as a signifier set within enormous discursive webs and systems of information that people interfaced with in myriad ways. More concretely, understandings of and debates about Mau Mau drove human action through their articulation in realms such as (counter)insurgency, politics, and popular culture in geographically-disparate regions of the world. Approaching “events” such as Mau Mau in this fashion reveals the layout of these discursive webs and how they formed around flows of imperial capital, anticolonial resistance, and professional networks.

From Mainstream to Social Media: The Kidnapped Yemeni Babies Affair in Israel and the Fight for Memory and Justice

This essay analyses the racial constructs and discursive webs that justified the separation of babies from their families, with reference to the Kidnapped Babies Affair in Israel. The discourse of hygiene and the view of Yemenite Jews as ‘Others,’ as articulated by David Ben-Gurion and other Ashkenazi Zionist leaders of Israel, are especially highlighted. The article contrasts mainstream-media framing practices with the dominance of new digital narratives. While the emergence of social media grants agency to previously silenced victims, I argue that the attitude of the Israeli state remains a major force in the ongoing Israeli official rejection of this story. Despite a breakthrough in the public perception of this narrative, the road to full transparency and justice remains elusive.

O que podemos no encontro com a infância? um convite a um olhar heterotópico

This paper aims to propose an invitation to look at the kind of childhood we have been constructing from the practices of Special Education, in articulation with the practices of Early Childhood Education. It problematizes the discursive webs formed in this articulation, considering the way that Special Education teachers working with Early Childhood in public schools regard childhood. Such discussions have derived from the uneasiness of thinking about how we have been producing childhood, given the policy of expanding mandatory attendance to four-year-old children. The analytical exercise, inspired by the discourse analysis proposed by Michel Foucault, has enabled us to question the production of subjects, truths and realities in the “confessions” of the interviewed teachers, in which we have identified two ways of thinking about and producing childhood: captured childhood, which is produced through the operationalization of normalization practices by Special Education, determined by the will to knowledge and the will to power over childhood; and childhood as heterotopy, produced as a powerful movement of resistance and denaturalization of normalizing practices – childhood regarded from other places, as an infinite, multiple, non-nameable, ever undetermined becoming, as an invitation to thought: what can we do in the encounter with childhood(s)?

Kill the hen that crows like a cock: animal encounters in Old Yiddish

This article focuses on a selection of Yiddish adaptations of well-known European tales, which were produced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It examines the ways in which these Old Yiddish tales express concerns surrounding Jewish life in Diaspora, by envisioning strange encounters between humans and animals. The article attempts to untangle the complex discursive web of which these animal-encounter tales formed a part, and which connected notions of humanity and animality with those of religion, gender and class. I argue that in their depictions of aberrant animality, these tales drew on the identification of Jews and animals, as well as on the relationship between animals and violence, to grapple with the dialectical relationship between Yiddish literature and its adjacent Hebrew and German libraries.

A educação em tempos de COVID-19: ensino remoto e exaustão docente

In this article, we aim to analyze a discursive web established from the need to adapt face-to-face activities to remote activities in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, during the social distancing caused by COVID-19. The news section of the websites of three organizations (SINEPE/RS, SINPRO/RS and CPERS/RS), as well as news published in the online version of the newspaper Zero Hora, in the period between March 16th and May 31st, 2020 were taken as empirical material. The research was developed based on a foucaultian orientation of discourse analysis. From the empiric material, two analytical axes were built: “Remote teaching between opportunities, difficulties and inequalities” and “Teaching taken to exhaustion”. Analysis shows the strengthening of disciplinary mechanisms, the growth of inequalities, some optimism with long-term effects and the intensification of teaching work, associated with the possibility of counter-conduct. Keywords: Remote teaching. School. Teaching. COVID-19. Pandemic.

Singing “The Song of Chief Iipumbu”

Abstract This essay addresses “The Song of Chief Iipumbu,” an oral poem performed by a woman named Nekwaya Loide Shikongo in North-Central Namibia in 1953. It argues that “The Song of Chief Iipumbu” acted as an astute analysis of local power relations, employing scornful commentary on a deposed native chief as a cover for subtle but profound criticisms of European colonial institutions to which Shikongo, as a African Christian woman, was subject. Through a brief history of colonialism in Namibia and detailed attention to the linguistic and discursive webs woven by the poem’s author, this essay shows that Shikongo’s censure of oppressive authorities was not an attempt to undermine the networks of power operating in colonial Namibia. Rather, it was an effort to affect acceptance of (or at least resignation to) her subordination in order to achieve the renewal of psychological and social equilibrium.

From Counter-Power to Counter-Pepe: The Vagaries of Participatory Epistemology in a Digital Age

This article reconstructs the evolution of societal and journalistic meta-discourse about the participation of ordinary citizens in the news production process. We do so through a genealogy of what we call “participatory epistemology”, defined here as a form of journalistic knowledge in which professional expertise is modified through public interaction. It is our argument that the notion of “citizen participation in news process” has not simply functioned as a normative concept but has rather carried with it a particular understanding of what journalists could reasonably know, and how their knowledge could be enhanced by engaging with the public in order to produce journalistic work. By examining four key moments in the evolution of participatory epistemology, as well as the discursive webs that have surrounded these moments, we aim to demonstrate some of the factors which led a cherished and utopian concept to become a dark and dystopian one. In this, we supplement the work of Quandt (2018) and add some historical flesh to the conceptual arguments of his article on “dark participation”.

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Saber y tradición: un estudio sobre la circulación del psicoanálisis en revistas universitarias argentinas (1949-1963)

Este artículo estudia la circulación del psicoanálisis en dos revistas académicas (Psique en la Universidad y Revista de la Universidad de Buenos Aires) que se publicaron a fines de la década del cincuenta y principios del sesenta, con el propósito de analizar el entramado discursivo que soporta a este campo y la paulatina instauración de una tradición discursiva psicoanalítica. Para ello, se toma como referencia los estudios del discurso y se consideran tres aspectos medulares: el dispositivo enunciativo, la construcción del saber psicoanalítico y la incorporación de la palabra ajena. A partir de este análisis, se ha podido determinar que mientras que las revistas se distinguen en cuanto a los dispositivos enunciativos y a la práctica de citación, la configuración del saber psicoanalítico varía en función de la pertenencia institucional y la formación de los autores.

Introduction: Blood Bound

Soren Frohlich and Michael DavidsonUniversity of California, San DiegoPart IBlood is obviously an integral component of the human body, but it is also a complex bridge between the material fluid and its social and cultural meanings. Blood will out, so to speak, not just in moments of injury, but also in discussions of identity, race, nationality, and community. As both metaphor and material, blood is the most familiar and yet, as Umberto Eco suggests in the idea of being strangers to blood, the most alien of substances. Blood signifies in an extensive discursive web that extends from ancient proscriptions against circumcision to modern prohibitions against blood-mixing, from symbolism associated with the Holy Grail to contemporary debates about genomic citizenship. The tension between the two dimensions of sanguinity-physiological and socio-cultural-has been central to disability studies in its distinction between a medical and social definition of what it means to be disabled. Blood has not featured significantly in this conversation, but with this special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies hope to confront this complex relationship between a vital fluid and a fluid semiotic.Why blood? Once noticed, blood seems to flow, trickle, and ooze everywhere, its presence filling works on history, theology, politics, medicine, social criticism, and creative texts. Before William Harvey's discovery of the circulatory system in his 1660 De Motu Cordis, blood was usually understood according to Aristotelian and Galenic cosmologies as one of four bodily humors.1 As historical anthropologist Piero Camporesi points out, blood was to some extent an ordinary part of daily life. Its theological dimension aside, blood was an unchanged and stable part of nature until physicians, authors, and the public at large identified its presumed transgression of the bodily envelope. Especially during the late nineteenth century, western physicians and social reformers increasingly interpreted blood as a potential threat to health, whether social or biological. Diseases like tuberculosis, cholera, and syphilis infected both the idealized personal body as well as the social body. In the mid-nineteenth century, blood was often seen as the carrier of inherited family traits such as feeble-mindedness, drunkenness, and sexual inversion. The rise of eugenics contributed to this impulse by focusing on the dangers of blood-mixing between disabled or deaf, non-Anglo, Jewish, and poor persons. The boundaries of blood were delineated in racist legal codices like the one-drop rule and blood quantum laws.2 In these contexts, blood and social ostracizing go hand in hand. Blood was no longer a corruptible matter, but itself a contagious pollutant on the way to a dysgenic future.Currently, developments in genetic forensics, reproductive technologies, and gene screening have raised the specter of a revived eugenic imperative. Blood seems once again to be the ultimate predictor of aptitude and ability, indicating values outside the lab test. Parents may opt for abortions of unborn children whose blood indicates certain gene markers associated with physical, sensory, or cognitive disorders. Tensions have arisen between reproductive and disability rights over issues of abortion and genetic testing. A current Ohio Bill, HB 135, being pushed by anti-abortion advocates, would prohibit a doctor from performing an abortion if a woman decides to terminate her pregnancy to avoid having a child with Down syndrome. Disability Rights advocates have criticized the bill for its assumption that, as the bill's advocates declare, we all want to be born perfect and for what that says about the non-traditional child.3Disability studies has much to offer in bringing issues of accountability and ethics to bear on blood discourse. Those who take seriously the long-neglected relation between blood and disability are reconstructing this history even as they deconstruct the power relations embedded within our understanding of blood. …

Wagner’s Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity

David Trippett’s sprawling, occasionally puzzling, yet often captivating and fascinating attempt to provide fresh insights into Richard Wagner’s compositional practices and aesthetic productions, combines wide-ranging and detailed scholarly reconstructions of some of the cultural contexts or ‘discursive constellations’ that framed the production and reception of Wagner’s works in nineteenth century Germany, with an intensely detailed, sometimes speculative intellectual analysis of the ways in which such re-framings hint at hidden layers of meaning in the aesthetic works themselves, meanings that Wagner himself did not necessarily recognize or share. It is important to point out that, although Trippett’s work is clearly focused on the ways in which discursive framings created different, historically shifting meanings for Wagner’s music, he does not claim that the substance and meaning of the work can simply be reduced to such historical constructions. Although specific discursive webs tend to be self-reflexive in the assignation of meanings, they do not simply construct different realities in different worlds. In a passage somewhat enigmatic in its own right, Trippett claims that his analysis does not assume a ‘substantial’ identity in the Wagner melodies that the different discourses engaged, nor does he claim that the different discourses simply leave us with a series of incommensurable constructions. Instead he claims that what the discourses implicitly share, and what draws them together as articulations of a unifying theme that can be addressed as ‘Wagner’s Melodies’, is a common assumption about melodic form as the articulation of expressive agency. Whether this form is discursively defined as a ‘a music-theoretical category, a philosophical idea, an unwritable utterance, embodied sensuality’ or a ‘material emblem of sound waves’, it holds the individual discourses together and ‘sublates’ their differences as participants in a shared discourse about melody as the musical articulation of a universal dynamics of identity formation (11). The patterned sequence of tones in harmonic space and musical time, the emergence of individuated narrative (with the characteristics of sensual embodiment and historical particularity) from undifferentiated being, provides the common form which the various discursive frameworks tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to define, control and possess as an integral objective experiential reality. Wagner’s melodies sustain a recognizable Wagnerian form through their various historical appropriations and transformations.

A CRÔNICA BRASILEIRA TECIDA PELA HISTÓRIA, PELO JORNALISMO E PELA LITERATURA

Neste texto, buscamos analisar como o gênero crônica histórica passa a funcionar como crônica brasileira, a partir do século XIX. Para isso, observamos a cadeia de sentidos que se constrói com o gênero ao longo de seu percurso discursivo, enfocando principalmente a trama discursiva dos discursos da História, do Jornalismo e da Literatura. A perspectiva teórica que embasa esta reflexão parte, principalmente, das leituras de Bakhtin (2003), Grillo (2006) e Machado (2005) sobre gêneros discursivos, e de Alencar (2003), Braga (2011), Coutinho (2003), Candido (1992) Meyer (1992), Santos (2005), entre outros, sobre o gênero crônica e seu funcionamento.

SIDEWAYS! : Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture

This essay conceptualizes the massive materiality of Victorian print culture both as a counterpart to the modern city (dynamic, multi-centered, unpredictable, rife with local formations) and as a discursive web. Lateral “sideways” navigation across genres, texts, and successive pages or issues helps to uncover print’s spatio-temporal convergences. Illustrative examples include adverts for Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend across the publishing titles he controlled, notices or silences about Dickens’s and Gaskell’s serial fiction in Sunday papers, and the mutually reinforcing fame of Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt” and Dickens’s Christmas Carol .

Remix: Practice, Context, Culture

Remix: Practice, Context, Culture

The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture

Although you can’t tell a book by its cover, Stephanie Merrim’s study seeking to understand the complexity of Colonial Spanish American urban culture is remarkably illustrated by Cristóbal de Villalpando’s seventeenth-century bird-eye’s view of Mexico City’s main plaza, depicting in minute detail nearly 1,200 people of all walks of life, its busy market place, and a riot-destroyed skyline. It is a spectacular vision, with a rich literary pedigree rigorously documented in Merrim’s book and epitomized in Bernardo de Balbuena’s well-known urban pastoral Grandeza mexicana. How can one tell the multiple stories that unravel in this vibrant, awe-inspiring but contradictory and heterogeneous urban maze? Merrim approaches this question from the vantage point of Spanish Ameri-can literary culture, examining a broad selection of iconic sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts that depict the New World city, its festivals, and its wonders. From Hernán Cortés and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo to Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as well as a number of lesser-studied writers such as Francisco Cer-vantes de Salazar, Agustín de Vetancurt, and Buenaventura de Salinas, Merrim analyzes how Spanish residents (radicados) and creoles write the city, coding its spaces morally, racially, and sexually. As Merrim clearly shows in each text approached, the depiction is not a straight rendition of the city but a thick and coiled discursive thread, rhetorically crafted with and drawing from a burgeoning colonial archive as well as classical, biblical, European, and Amerindian sources. These writers are nonetheless confronted with a rich and heterogeneous reality that resists discursive enclosure.The argument is developed contrasting the Renaissance and the Baroque visions of the city, rightly pointing out that one of the key studies of the colonial Spanish American city conflated both, Angel Rama’s Ciudad letrada (1984). The imperial dream of a transparent, orderly space is present from Cortés’s letters to Philip II’s 1573 Ordenanzas. The colonial city’s heterogeneous society is problematically inscribed and objectified in descriptions of the marketplace, where autochthonous natural produce like guavas, mameys, and sapotes stand in for the Indians (p. 76). The market is also a high point of Balbuena’s poem celebrating Mexico’s greatness as a wonder cabinet offered as a gift to the empire (p. 127). The creole writers will take these renditions and rework them to affirm their place in colonial society and inscribe themselves in the Hispanic world, in what represents a creole cultural nationalism. Carving a space of their own, the key point in the cultural politics of the New World Baroque literary production is how deeply these writers engage the plurality of their own societies on this side of the Atlantic. Merrim recognizes that the colonial writers selected — mostly Spaniards and creoles — ultimately seek to contain the heterogeneous urban space. Another perspective could be presented by looking at the ample archive of postconquest Nahuatl texts, such as the Annals of Tlatelolco, Nahuatl dramas, and local histories written by don Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc and don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin. From another point of view, Merrim’s study shows that an epistemological aperture within Western-based texts is also possible. One of the quintessential preoccupations of the Baroque is precisely the limits of knowledge. Merrim demonstrates this splendidly in her examination of the creoles’ appropriations of Athanasius Kircher’s works, Sor Juana’s in particular, who uses the well-reputed Jesuit’s thought to defend against his embittered confessor and to assert her unlimited desire for knowledge in the Answer. Still, Merrim convincingly argues that Sor Juana distances herself critically from Kircher in Primero sueño by highlighting the impossible quest for truth.As stated above, Merrim looks primarily at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexican literary culture. The thick of the argument concentrates on the Baroque, highlighting nuances brought forth by the New World Baroque. Six of seven chapters are dedicated to Mexico with the last one examining texts from New Granada, Potosí, and Lima, which gives breath to the study without losing coherence. This is high-caliber scholarship that draws from postcolonial and transatlantic studies to underscore the predicament of Latin America’s colonial legacy. In this view, it is not gratuitous that creoles imagined Babel when faced with colonial violence. But, as Merrim optimistically points out, the creole imagination also holds hope for a better world. With no doubt, this conceptually well-defined and rigorously developed project allows us to understand better the intricate discursive web and the cultural politics of colonial writers. In sum, The Spectacular City is excellent reading for colonial Latin American literary and cultural scholars as well as advanced and graduate students.

Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse (review)

Reviewed by: Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse J. Michael Colvin Karen Elaine Smyth, Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company 2011) x + 187 pp. Karen Smyth’s brilliant though frustrating new book explores the various conceptions of time evident in the poetry of John Lydgate of Bury and Thomas Hoccleve. Divided into six chapters, Smyth’s book first erects an “empirical-based [sic] morphology” to investigate the multiple and situational methods of reckoning and communicating time available to these two poets (5). Smyth takes Aron Gurevich’s understanding of time as a socially- and culturally-constructed quantity (akin to space, gender, etc.), and seeks to explicate the various means by which medieval thinkers experienced, managed, rationalized, and explained time. Smyth begins her book with a relatively simple premise: that the dominant modern discourse of time—as a linear progression of discrete, yet causally-related, concatenated episodes—was but one of many strategies of time-consciousness available to late-medieval thinkers. Cyclical time (i.e., seasonal, diurnal, etc.) and typological time (i.e., salvific, Providential, etc.) existed alongside linear time, and medieval thinkers employed various conceptions of time in a situational manner: different time-reckoning strategies did and meant different things. Time was equally “quantitative” and “qualitative,” both dependently and autonomously significant. Smyth reminds us that “texts use different discourses of horizontal, vertical, cyclical, spiral, linear, thematic, synchronic times, and ... there are many variations on these models, deeply rooted in the cultural specificities of period and place” (16). As histories of time-consciousness have tended to be largely technologically or linguistically deterministic, Smyth locates her intervention as a cultural approach to the question. Smyth’s first chapter, entitled “Cultural Narratives of Time,” is her most compelling. A cultural narrative, per Smyth’s formulation, suggests a “vernacularity” (5) of “the conceptual categories” (6) devised to measure, manage, explain, and mark time; these narratives are the products of negotiation. She organizes this chapter into eight parts, each of which forms an intervention into a larger methodological argument about time itself. Smyth first “explores the idea that new terms in the vernacular for expressing time reckonings and duration of time were devised in tandem with technological developments” (15). Precision of time-reckoning, argues Smyth, led to novel ways of expressing the existence and passage of time; these new methods and expressions fall into a general category of “mechanization,” which Smyth believes encompasses the advent of time-terminologies and the indices by which they are measured. Smyth then examines the increasing awareness of measured time—and the tools employed to measure it—resulting in a historical consciousness of “living ‘within timeness’” (20–21). Smyth’s third subsection details the multiple coexistent temporal conceptions marked by various schemata and reckoning devices, including “religious feasts, mechanical hours, seasonal referents, astronomical calculations, subjective feelings and by ages of the world” (21). These [End Page 284] expressions were “context-dependent” and rhetorically significant to their circumstance. Smyth later details methods of time-regulation (30–33) and their manifestation in literature (33–51), respectively. Finally, section eight explicates the ambiguities of time-representation in late-medieval English literature, concluding that Smyth’s authors were well aware of the dynamic, sophisticated, and varied temporal consciousness available to their conceptual palate (56); authors were able to manipulate their expressions of time-consciousness by means of imagining and visualizing time in accordance with their ideological programs (57–58). The remainder of Smyth’s monograph applies this analytical morphology to two exemplary case studies: chapters 2 through 4 explicate the various imaginings of time in Lydgate’s verse, and chapters 5 and 6 focus on Hoccleve’s works. Chapter 2 discusses Lydgate’s deployment of time-sensitive language by locating his Troy Book in a historical moment, concluding that the author “demonstrates an artistic awareness of temporal ploys within narrative structures” that “create[s] a discursive web of coexisting causal and disjunctive attitudes toward time” (78). Chapter 3 examines Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes and concludes that the author’s use of comparatives emphasizes “the context-dependent nature of [time] expressions; the coexistence of the objective and subjective [time-referents]; episodic and causal...

Coleridge’s Orientalist View of Mahomet

From an Orientalist viewpoint, Coleridge and his poems were shaped by the discursive web of the 18th century culture, and he was not free from the worldliness of historical forces. However, it is not difficult to see resistance towards dominant ideologies in his poems. One example is Coleridge’s sentiment towards the systematically-misrepresented Islam and its prophet. Coleridge’s radical interpretation of Islam in the 1790s made him feel the need, with Southey, for a model of moral regeneration after observing European corruption and having lost his radical interest in the millennial politics of the French Revolution. The radical act of composing “Mahomet” signifies Coleridge’s endeavor to change the distorted image of Mahomet and Islam that to him was the beginning of the Unitarian revolution and the symbol of the revolutionary France. However, he perpetuates the prejudice of Christianity’s superiority over Islam as a deviation of the true religion introduced by Christ. Coleridge’s approach is imaginative reconciliation of Christo-Islamic inspirations to offer his political thoughts and avoid identification with English Unitarianism.