Humanistic Ethos Research Articles

New Cultural Studies: Exploring New Directions and Territories

The purpose of this paper is to critically engage the work of a generation of new cultural studies theorists. This work appears in a volume entitled New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Eds. Gary Hall and Clare Birchall: 2006), which purports to have launched a new project of cultural studies by introducing the work of a post-Birmingham generation of theorists and practitioners. The theorists claim that the so-called revolution is over, and the erstwhile hotbeds of high theory are currently returning to a more humanist ethos and more politically useful modes of research and analysis. But it is also said that this new generation of cultural studies theorists does not jettison theory altogether for, paradoxically, it is a generation shaped by theory itself, and which continues to see in it the means of thinking through some of the most important issues and problems in contemporary culture and society.

Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais by E. Bruce Hayes

more illuminating than littérature-monde en français. David Murphy compares and contrasts the manifesto with other recent French postcolonial manifestoes. The second section provides further contextualization. Forsdick and Lydie Moudileno separately place the manifesto in the context of debates on transnational/ postcolonial issues, French/Francophone studies, and local/global politics. Chris Bongie and Dominic Thomas each move outward from the manifesto to address two other debates that partially overlap with the littérature-monde one, Haitian/ Caribbean politics and French identity politics around writer Marie NDiaye. Thomas Spear argues that littérature-monde is a new concept only in the very small world of top Parisian publishing houses. Jane Hiddleston establishes that the manifesto’s humanistic ethos was articulated earlier and with much more sophistication by Césaire, Fanon, and Said, whom the authors of the manifesto ignore. The third and final section expands the contextualizing goal of the entire volume. Jean-Xavier Ridon links issues raised in the manifesto with earlier debates around exotic and travel literature. Jacqueline Dutton seeks to develop concrete criteria for what kinds of texts would fit the littérature-monde nomenclature through a case study of ‘migrant’ French works taking place in Australia, which she terms French-Australian literature. Jeanne Garane and Laura Reeck separately point out that the manifesto effectively excludes what would seem to be the most obvious example of littérature-monde, that is, banlieue or migrant literature. Michelle Keown demonstrates that the manifesto’s globalized French model is not relevant to Pacific Islander writers, whose Indigenist liberation politics align them more with Anglophone Pacific Islander writers than with French-language proponents of littérature-monde en français. For Keown, littératuremonde is more relevant to white (settler) writers, a point confirmed by Dutton in the Australian context. Both Garane and Keown point to the importance and complexity of the issue of translation in debates on littérature-monde. Michael Syrotinski contrasts the utopian tone of the manifesto with the pessimism of contemporary male African writers. Hiddleston and Syrotinski both favor the embodied texts of the authors they discuss over the idealism of the manifesto and call for ethical and dissident reading practices. Finally, Emily Apter argues in her afterword for the value of attending to untranslatability in literature and philosophy. Contributors to the volume include major voices in the field of Francophone postcolonial studies today, especially those based in North America and the United Kingdom. The book is presented as being the first in a new series, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, whose editorial board includes many of the contributors. This well-conceived volume augurs well for the series. San Diego State University Anne Donadey HAYES, E. BRUCE. Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7546-6518-2. Pp. 188. $99.95. On peut s’étonner qu’il n’y ait jamais encore eu d’enquête approfondie sur la nature et la fonction de la farce dans l’œuvre de Rabelais. Sans doute, au début du vingtième siècle, des érudits comme Gustave Cohen et Emmanuel Philipot s’étaientils penchés sur la présence importante du théâtre comique médiéval chez notre Reviews 571 Chinonais. Mais, encore récemment, Michel Jeanneret attirait notre attention sur cette curieuse carence alors que plusieurs centaines de farces existaient à l’époque. Nous avons maintenant réparé cet oubli grâce à ce nouvel ouvrage qui vient redonner à la farce sa place centrale dans les ‘mythologies pantagruéliques’. Comme l’indique Hayes dans son introduction, le but qu’il se propose n’est pas d’identifier les allusions au corpus farcesque médiéval mais plutôt d’examiner dans quelle mesure Rabelais a pu structurer son œuvre à partir des éléments pertinents qui définissent ce genre traditionnel. Tout en reconnaissant à quel point les travaux de Bakhtine ont transformé les études rabelaisiennes, Hayes prend ses distances par rapport à la théorie du ‘monde à l’envers’ et rejette l’idée de la farce comme ‘soupape de sécurité’ essentielle dans une société fortement hiérarchisée et étroitement soumise à l’autorité du sceptre et...

Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste

Abstract This article considers questions of affect and ethics in relation to three films about waste: Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (1999), Lucy Walker’s Waste Land (2010), and Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009). Drawing from new materialist models, the article situates the ethical import of these very different films in relation to the way that they present waste as a vibrant and affectively charged medium through which we might rethink relations between people and things. It argues that a careful evaluation of the way these films generate and manage affect is crucial to an understanding of the kinds of ethical work each might be said to perform. While The Gleaners and I and Waste Land emphasize the uplifting feelings that can be generated from trash if we learn to see it differently, Trash Humpers rejects the activist, humanist ethos of Varda’s and Walker’s films in favour of an avant-garde impulse to degrade and defile. However, despite its nihilistic approach to its subject matter, this article argues that Trash Humpers’ feel-bad aesthetic does not rule out the possibility of ethical engagement. Rather, it offers important insights about the role of negative affect within an ethics of waste.

Working with offenders: challenges to the recovery agenda

SummaryRecovery approaches are now being developed in forensic as well as general mental health services. These are welcome developments that offer new ways of working with a socially excluded group of patients. However, the theoretical basis of recovery, with its individual humanistic ethos, may struggle to articulate the unique problems of forensic service users. In this article, we describe those problems and propose a ‘third way’ of thinking that bridges the recovery agenda (which looks for the best in people) and the forensic agenda (which must consider the worst in people). We propose using a ‘narrative approach’, which sees the forensic service user's offence and cruelty as part of their human story. We link this explicitly with the work of Dan McAdams and his concept of the redemption narrative.

Manifestations of Humanism in Revolutionary Cuba

The humanist dimension of revolutionary Cuban society owes much to the thinking and action of Che Guevara, a principal architect of the Cuban Revolution. Examination of Che's association with the humanist tradition of revolutionary thought and, in particular, the ideas of Martí and Marx reveals his resolute devotion to moral standards and human values (as promoted by José Martí) and a revolutionary “theoretical response” to defeating human alienation, oppression, exploitation, and inequality (as advanced by the Marxist tradition). Through his contributions, revolutionary Cuban society embraced a distinctively humanistic ethos despite the efforts of others to imbue it with a dogmatic, cold scholasticism. While some political doctrines have changed since his death, fundamental socialist tenets prevail in Cuba to this day.

Disgust, Bodily Aesthetics and the Ethic of Being Human in Botswana

This article explores how people in Botswana approach and navigate their own feelings of disgust and morbid curiosity towards the aesthetically impaired bodies of their fellow citizens, and the problems and opportunities these feelings present in a context where a particular humanistic ethos of respect and manners,botho, is stressed in the public discourse of nationalism. The agenda of contemporary disability and patients' rights movements is based on the assertion that moral sentiment is neither determined nor subverted by particular bodily states or configurations. While such activism acknowledges and affirms experiences of debility and physical suffering, the political agenda largely centres on enabling persons to participate equally in rational-critical discourse in the public sphere regardless of the vagaries of any individual's particular bodily state. Within this framework, physicality should have no power to structure relationships among citizens. And yet, in Botswana, as in other places, the messiness of the human body – manifested in diarrhoea, drool, disfigurement, and disgust – threatens to subvert humanistic efforts, and challenges the smooth enactment of rights-based politics and other liberal projects. In what follows I explore the sometimes troubling physicality of humanistic and affective life in Botswana to better grasp the messy bodily dimensions of sociality that are so often swept under the rug in discussions of citizenship, rights and community. Aesthetic efforts at bathing, bandaging and otherwise reworking the bodies in question reveal dimensions of sociality and aspects of sensory and affective interaction that are critical to the enactment of moral sentiment.

Disgust, Bodily Aesthetics and the Ethic of Being Human in Botswana

This article explores how people in Botswana approach and navigate their own feelings of disgust and morbid curiosity towards the aesthetically impaired bodies of their fellow citizens, and the problems and opportunities these feelings present in a context where a particular humanistic ethos of respect and manners, botho, is stressed in the public discourse of nationalism. The agenda of contemporary disability and patients' rights movements is based on the assertion that moral sentiment is neither determined nor subverted by particular bodily states or configurations. While such activism acknowledges and affirms experiences of debility and physical suffering, the political agenda largely centres on enabling persons to participate equally in rational-critical discourse in the public sphere regardless of the vagaries of any individual's particular bodily state. Within this framework, physicality should have no power to structure relationships among citizens. And yet, in Botswana, as in other places, the messiness of the human body – manifested in diarrhoea, drool, disfigurement, and disgust – threatens to subvert humanistic efforts, and challenges the smooth enactment of rights-based politics and other liberal projects. In what follows I explore the sometimes troubling physicality of humanistic and affective life in Botswana to better grasp the messy bodily dimensions of sociality that are so often swept under the rug in discussions of citizenship, rights and community. Aesthetic efforts at bathing, bandaging and otherwise reworking the bodies in question reveal dimensions of sociality and aspects of sensory and affective interaction that are critical to the enactment of moral sentiment.

The Fundamental Directions of General Education and Vocational School Reform Endorsed by the CPSU Central Committee Plenum on 10 April and by the USSR Supreme Soviet on 12 April [1984

The Party's drive toward the systematic and comprehensive optimization of developed socialism, the fuller revelation of its humanist ethos, and the ongoing elevation of the creative activism of the individual presents the Soviet school with great and momentous challenges.