Mode Of Critique Research Articles

Beyond the Postcolonial, but Why Exactly? Ten Steps towards a New Enthusiasm for Postcolonial Studies

AbstractPostcolonial theory has now been evolving for over thirty years and has gone through several changes. My purpose in this article is to explore the question whether ›postcolonialism‹ is still a vital paradigm and how it is applied today. I will thus be participating in the discussion of a theme inherent in postcolonial studies from the very beginning: that of self-reflexive analysis. My purpose here is to give reasons why we still should join the club, and what we see in the current, everyday world that calls for postcolonial literary studies. In the following, I suggest ten current challenges that would benefit from the postcolonial apparatus of concepts and criticism. In this task, I am (critically) leaning on the Anglophone postcolonial scholarship.I first capture some of the criticisms directed at postcolonial theorizing, and suggest some general perspectives on these self-critical debates. My aim is thus to provoke discussion of the new orientations occurring in postcolonial studies following the collapse of the intellectual power of »the narrative of decolonization itself«, as argued by Simon Gikandi in his analysis of contemporary globalization (2001, 637). In the first section, I want therefore to ask whether it is currently enough merely ›to reveal and deconstruct‹ structures of colonial power embedded in fiction, as many literary scholars did in the 1990s, and whether such readings can become paradigmatic standpoints of postcolonial theorizing.Next, I consider the impact of postcolonial studies on contemporary fiction writing. I suggest that the institutionalizing of postcolonial scholarship has also affected contemporary world literatures. The question arises whether literature (or the politics of publishing) has reacted to postcolonial debates, and whether there exists such a thing as ›postcolonial canon formation‹, shaping the idea of the ›proper‹ postcolonial novel. The third section of this article, however, focuses on the new challenges and questions that postcolonial theorizing faces. I try to answer some of the criticisms postcolonial theory has faced, and provide a list of topics and contexts within which postcolonial theorizing is still a vital theoretical tool extending beyond its ›routines‹.My ›ten steps‹ towards a new enthusiasm for postcolonial studies do not constitute a coherent paradigm shift, or a concise view, but suggest some current openings based on the tradition of postcolonial studies. First, I will discuss multi- or interdisciplinarity and claim that such contemporary postcolonial topics as eco­catastrophes, studies on war, peace, and terrorism, or the social media, for example, are far too complicated issues to be studied from the point of view of one discipline only. The second challenge for postcolonial literary studies in this article has to do with the post-occidental turn. I suggest that studies on many kinds of minority literatures may benefit from the ›triangularization‹ of the binary legacy of British Imperialism inherent in Postcolonial literary studies.I call the third challenge ›turning the direction of influences‹. I wonder what if postcolonial theoretical influences would not be borrowed merely from the critical discourse of Commonwealth literary studies: Postcolonial studies have a great deal to learn from other indigenous modes of criticism. The fourth reason not to abandon postcolonial is the question of historicization, providing a context for current (political) rhetorics and actions, particularly media narratives. My fifth new challenge for postcolonial studies concerns the re-politicization of otherness, a theme discussed widely by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton. What they mean is that ›the other‹ is currently represented in terms of fear rather than of oppression. I suggest that the postcolonial vocabulary has the potential to tackle this new form of fear.Relating to previous challenges, my sixth suggestion for postcolonial studies is more political and leads us more directly towards the emerging field of terrorism studies and analyzing the rhetorics of current world politics. The seventh new application is obviously related to religion and religious identities: Postcolonial terminology has the explanatory power to analyze the way, for example, that the current Islamophobia draws on old racist discourses and imageries. Following from these contemporary political challenges, my eighth proposition for postcolonial studies relates to the new media environment: globalization, the free flow of images in the (social) media, but at the same time the unedited dissemination of hate speech. The remaining two steps for postcolonial studies are related to the emerging field of posthumanism, dislodging the human agent from the position of sole structurer of the surrounding reality. They concern both ecocriticism and new materialism.Like this article too, the postcolonial critical practice has self-analyzed its own problems ever since its zenith. The ten new steps listed above, however, are reasons why I want to join the postcolonial club sometimes represented as old-fashioned. For ethical reasons, I am – and want to be – enthusiastic about postcolonial theorizing.

Kissing a Photograph: Reproductive Panic in Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy

Kissing a Photograph:Reproductive Panic in Kate Chopin and Thomas Hardy Arielle Zibrak (bio) The late-nineteenth-century writer Kate Chopin was fond of shocking people. It was perhaps for this reason that she kept a copy of Thomas Hardy's 1895 novel Jude the Obscure on display in her home.1 Her review of Jude, published in the St. Louis Criterion in 1897, begins with an anecdote about a polite female guest shocked to find the volume left out on a visiting-room table: "'Oh! how can you!' she exclaimed, 'with so many young people about!'"2 While this reaction clearly delights Chopin (her liberal use of exclamation points in the transcription is good evidence alone), she proceeds to trash Hardy's novel, stating outright that "the book is detestably bad" (714). Yet, in her prose, Chopin also betrays certain admiration for, or perhaps merely an uncomfortable identification with, the novel she purports to hate.3 When "one or two youngsters" ask her about the book, Chopin responds that it is "unutterably tiresome … but you might like it" (714). Indeed, her primary objection to the novel, reformulated and repeated throughout the review, is that it's incredibly boring: "ponderous … formidable … nothing alluring … the outward appearance of a Congressional Record … colorless … unpardonably dull" etc., etc. (713–14). She laments that no one was interested in the book prior to the controversy it stirred in the press, a controversy into which she, as yet another reviewer of the novel, has now entered; but under what terms? It seems rather irrelevant and late in the day to say all this about Jude the Obscure. It is only sympathy for the young person which moves me to do so. I hate to know that deceptions are being practiced upon him. He has been led to believe that the work is quite dangerous and alluring … I feel very sorry to think that he should part with so many good silver quarters and receive nothing in return but disappointment and dissolution. (715) [End Page 355] This ridiculous assertion of concern for "the young person" wasting his money on a boring novel is Chopin's satirical response to the overzealous parade of reviewers that felt compelled to damn Jude in both the English and American presses out of fear for what it might do to impressionable youths. Margaret Oliphant's notorious review in Blackwood's is a good example of this mode of criticism.4 Oliphant writes, "[T]o make [sex] the supreme incident, always in the foreground, to be discussed by young men and women, and held up before boys and girls … seems to me an outrage for which there is no justification."5 Chopin enters the debate not to defend the portrayal of sexuality in Jude, but rather to lament that the young reader who goes to the book in search of it will find little to gratify his or her curiosity. The performance of her own "outrage" at the dullness of Hardy's novel is less a gesture aimed at Hardy or Jude than it is a perverse counterstrike against reviewers who object to the "immorality" of novels that portray sexual desire. Chopin responds to the sex panic of Hardy's reviewers with an art panic of her own: our concern, she suggests, should be protecting the sanctity of children's minds from bad literature. In Sex Panic and the Punitive State (2011), Roger Lancaster outlines the social, cultural, and judicial power of sex panics from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Echoing Lee Edelman's 2004 polemic No Future, Lancaster asserts that "the constant element in successive waves of panic is the figure of the imperiled innocent child—a child whose innocence is defined in terms of his imagined sexlessness and whose protection from sex looms as an ever more urgent and exacting demand."6 This profoundly effective rhetoric is nowhere more present than in Oliphant's defamatory review. (And it is precisely this rhetoric that Chopin appropriates.) After repeatedly harping upon the dangers to young people that Jude and Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895) pose, Oliphant laments the extermination of Jude and Sue's children, who...

Bad Art, Quirky Modernism

This essay considers the systems of value that undergird the employment of quirky objects in scholarship and argues that quirk historicism is another iteration of modernism in its attachment to estrangement and theatricality as modes of critique. In doing so, the essay asks why it is that “bad art” is so much easier to co-opt into scholarship when it’s safely in the past.

British industrial relations pluralism in the era of neoliberalism

This article provides a broad overview of the pluralist tradition in UK industrial relations scholarship, identifying its defining characteristics and mapping its evolution in recent decades. It deals in turn with the following: the appreciation of the relative interests of workers and employers that lies at the heart of the pluralist frame of reference, the research agenda that flows from this understanding, pluralist conceptions of context and agency within industrial relations, the standards that pluralists habitually use when assessing the employment relationship, the targets and modes of critique that pluralists direct against intellectual opponents, and the prescriptions that pluralists offer for industrial relations reform. Throughout the article there is a focus on change within the pluralist tradition and the manner in which it has adapted to the hegemony of neoliberalism in the realms of both ideas and policy.

Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate ed. by Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith (review)

HOLLY A. CROCKER AND D. VANCE SMITH, eds., Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. 534. isbn: 978-0-415-66789-6 (cloth), 978-0-415-66790-6 (pbk). $125 (cloth), $55.95 (pbk).Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate is a powerful collection for long-standing professionals and graduate students alike. Unlike most essay collections consisting entirely of new scholarly work, Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate (MLCD) provides a rich contextual slice of medieval studies over the past twenty five years. While most essays were first published after the millennium, a few notable essays from the 1990's are also included (David Lawton's iconic essay, for example, 'Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,' first published in 1987), signaling the way in which these earlier essays have continued to exert significant influence in the field of medieval literary studies well into the 21st century. There are essays here from David Wallace, Bruce Holsinger, Patricia Clare Ingram, Christine Chism, the hardworking duo of Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman, well-known to Arthurian scholars, and many other fine scholars of medieval literature. Re-published essays from esteemed colleagues are worth reading for the first or fourth time. The resulting collection is akin to aggregating the best plenary lectures of Kalamazoo, Leeds, The New Chaucer Society, The International Arthurian Society, and the MLA all into one volume. For graduate students, the volume is essential reading as a means of entering the conversations that have shaped and are currently shaping the field of late-medieval studies, and each chapter offers suggestions for further reading that includes other important essays published in the last 25 years. The majority of the volume, however, consists of newly-commissioned work across a provocative range of constructs, grouped together to spark critical dialogue.Editors Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith, both contributors to the volume, attribute their inspiration for their methodological approach to medieval debate poetry. As the editors assert, 'Scholastic method . . . is a mode of critique, a testing of the possibility of what is being asserted, and an analysis of how it is thought about' (4). In this spirit, MLCD does not have one theoretical perspective but provides, instead, a spirited (rather than 'bloodless' [5]) celebration of polyphonic voices and debate. The volume is thus organized 'around a series of counter-posed topics' with the goal of enacting 'the capacious dynamism that is present from the outset of the medieval disputation' (3).Essays are grouped so as to enhance dialectical exchange within conceptual categories such as 'Form and History,' 'Belief and Thought,' 'Gender and Sexuality,' 'Memory and Matter,' 'Nation and Language,' 'Time and Place,' 'Science and Embodiment,' 'Period and Politics,' and 'Desire and Performance.' Within these groupings are essays on chronicles, ballads, romance, Chaucer, religious texts, conduct books, the Pearl Poet, the Ancrene Wisse, Hoccleve, fabliau, Mandeville's Travels, Malory, Christian-Jewish relations, and more. …

Punk Rock, Thatcher, and the Elsewhere of Northern Ireland: Rethinking the Politics of Popular Music

This essay focuses on the political efficacy of popular music to critique dominant ideologies concerning nationhood and personal identity. During Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister of Britain, punk rock and post-punk music flourished as a mode of expression to challenge the ways in which Thatcher’s conservative agenda affected British social life. This study examines the theoretical possibility that punk rock can serve as a mode of critique and addresses how punk rock music in Northern Ireland attempted to disrupt the Thatcherite position on the conflict in Northern Ireland (also known as The Troubles).

Drawing Complaint

Matthew Barney’s 2006 solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art showcased large-scale sculptures, drawings, and photographs relating to his film Drawing Restraint 9 featuring the artist and his partner Björk on a whaling ship in Japan. This essay examines Barney’s neo-Orientalist project in light of cultural appropriation and discusses the author’s participation in Drawing Complaint: Memoirs of Björk-Geisha, a guerrilla art scheme to interrupt the exhibition opening. The successes and failures of this intervention are considered alongside other artistic practices that deploy disidentification and hyperracial drag to interrogate the consumption of exotic and erotic spectacles only to encounter further exotification or cooptation. This essay also reflects on the instability of disidentificatory interventionist tactics as well as the psychic and personal toll of embodying toxic representations especially for queer artists of color who deliberately perform their own racial and sexual abjection as a mode of critique.

Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem, by Jean-Philippe Marcoux

<i>Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem</i>, by Jean-Philippe Marcoux

Soundspace: A Manifesto

ABSTRACTThe manifesto is a long-standing and powerful tool for challenge within architecture, deployed by those as diverse as Vitruvius and Frank Lloyd Wright (who proposed a Walt Whitman-inspired “Work Song” of 1896) to those publishing in blogs across the designing planet today. Manifestos are locations for dreaming, for the banging of shoes, for passion in words about the environment we invent. Our manifesto follows in that tradition of poetry and critical optimism in calling for a new architecture of soundspace.Here we wish to act as Markus Miessen’s “uninvited outsider” (Miessen 2010), a transgressive voice that disturbs the status quo beyond comfortable familiarity and brings together different types of thinkers and various modes of critique.[1] In this article we seek to probe “fundamental questions about how and for whom the built environment is produced and … conventional frameworks or oldestablished rules and regulations” through the interdisciplinarity that sound studies demands.[2] The ear to transgression is open.[3]

Occupy Bartleby

By examining the repeated appearances of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby” at Occupy Wall Street protests, this essay examines public modes of literary criticism. In calling upon “Bartleby,” how does Occupy Wall Street interpret and make use of American literature? If the demonstrators who invoked “Bartleby” were not interpreting or analyzing the short story in ways that were immediately recognizable, what then were they doing with it? The essay’s aim is not to read the protests but rather to read how Occupy reads. It is an endeavor that also entails some reflection about how professionally trained readers read. Taken together, these inquires can illuminate some important differences between activist citations of “Bartleby” and the protocols of professional literary criticism, which are often seen as proximate to political activity, if not political activity themselves.

The Limits of Securitization Theory: Observational Criticism and the Curious Absence of Israel

Most discussions concerning how to evaluate theories make reference to empirical, methodological, logical, or normative criticisms. Less attention is given to how challenges in the theory itself affect the choice of cases. In this paper, I put forward the concept of observational criticism, which aims to trace biases in the empirical employment of a theory. While it overlaps with some of the criticisms mentioned above, observational criticism distinctly focuses on what we can learn about a theory through the prominence or absence of cases, or types of case, in the scholarship. To this end, I suggest a three-stage approach for this criticism and I demonstrate each of these stages, as well as the utility of this framework, through a consideration of securitization scholarship—and more specifically of how securitization studies have overlooked the case of securitization moves in Israel. I suggest that although the concept of securitization has generated a great many studies on various theoretical and empirical issues, and despite the prominence of security discourse and practices in Israel, securitization scholarship has tended to avoid studying the securitization processes of this country. Following this mode of criticism, I argue that securitization theory could be more easily implemented in the case of Israel by, among other things, further clarifying the meaning of securitization success and its duration.

Surveillance, Snowden, and Big Data: Capacities, consequences, critique

The Snowden revelations about National Security Agency surveillance, starting in 2013, along with the ambiguous complicity of internet companies and the international controversies that followed provide a perfect segue into contemporary conundrums of surveillance and Big Data. Attention has shifted from late C20th information technologies and networks to a C21st focus on data, currently crystallized in “Big Data.” Big Data intensifies certain surveillance trends associated with information technology and networks, and is thus implicated in fresh but fluid configurations. This is considered in three main ways: One, the capacities of Big Data (including metadata) intensify surveillance by expanding interconnected datasets and analytical tools. Existing dynamics of influence, risk-management, and control increase their speed and scope through new techniques, especially predictive analytics. Two, while Big Data appears to be about size, qualitative change in surveillance practices is also perceptible, accenting consequences. Important trends persist – the control motif, faith in technology, public-private synergies, and user-involvement – but the future-orientation increasingly severs surveillance from history and memory and the quest for pattern-discovery is used to justify unprecedented access to data. Three, the ethical turn becomes more urgent as a mode of critique. Modernity's predilection for certain definitions of privacy betrays the subjects of surveillance who, so far from conforming to the abstract, disembodied image of both computing and legal practices, are engaged and embodied users-in-relation whose activities both fuel and foreclose surveillance.

Rebel masculinities of star/director/text: James Dean, Nicholas Ray, and Rebel Without a Cause

Director Nicholas Ray is arguably most familiar to cinema culture as the American test case for la politique des auteurs, the influential mode of film criticism formulated at the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma after World War II. Ray was elevated to the status of film ‘author’ for a consistency of vision and style associated with rebellion. Yet, he was known in the film industry as an ‘actor's director,’ both for his background in theater and for bringing Lee Strasberg's ‘The Method’ to Hollywood after it had gained considerable cachet at the Actors Studio in New York since the 1930s. Although Ray was relatively unknown among the movie-going public, his films were (and still remain) recognizable for their male stars, including James Dean, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart. In this essay, I look at his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), to argue that Ray's reputation as a rebel auteur was as much the product of highbrow auteurist film criticism as the mass cultural persona of ‘rebel male hero’ that the film's star James Dean cultivated. As an actor, Dean was promoted at the vanguard of an innovative and experimental new performance style. Further, his star-performance text reveals a construction of masculinity that the film asks us to view as socially rebellious, which is retroactively linked to Ray. Both the film and the popular press form Dean's image constituted by his self-fashioned sense of authenticity, his non-normative sexuality, his highly publicized death, and the identification with an alternative family structure his role invites.

Historicism and Critique

This paper argues that historicism can provide substantive philosophical grounds for critical theory and various modes of critique. Unlike the developmental historicism that dominated the nineteenth century, we start from a radical historicism tied to nominalism, contingency, and contestability. This radical historicism is compatible with a commitment to truth claims, including the truth of historicism and the truth of particular genealogies and other accounts of the world. Genealogy can be viewed as radical historicism in its critical guise, denaturalizing the ideas it targets. In addition, however, radical historicism provides possible grounds for both historical ontology and a revised version of ideology critique. Ideology is conceived here in relation to failures in consciousness itself rather than the alleged conflicts of a material base.

Road registers

This article is an outline of a method to approach an object of analysis as generative, compositional, and immanent to ordinary ways of living and proliferating worlds. Using the case of the American road as an emergent assemblage, I trace its singular forms and the ways in which these forms register forces of all kinds. Road registers are material-symbolic composites charged with potentiality. They form links between disparate phenomena, scales, and compositional modes from literature to state thinking, structure to fantasy. I use creative non-fiction writing as a mode of critique that can follow the lines of diverging tendencies and events in which a range of elements throw together. I present a series of snapshots of the road’s bodies and rhythms, orientations, and atmospheres. Road Registers is a middle-range concept used to rethink designations such as macro and micro, big and small, official and everyday. I elaborate affect theory’s insight that structures of living have not just effects or conditions of possibility, but also capacities to affect and to be affected, or an energetics.

Crafting the normative subject: queerying the politics of race in the New Zealand Health education classroom

This article explores the potential of queering as a mode of critique by problematising the ways in which liberal politics of race shape normative understandings of health in a high school classroom. Drawing on findings from an Australian and New Zealand (NZ) research project designed to respond to religious and cultural difference in school-based sexuality education programmes, we critically queer how the Māori concept of hauora is deployed in the intended and operational NZ Health curriculum to shape the raced subject. Despite the best intentions of curriculum developers and classroom teachers to utilise Māori ways of knowing to meet their obligations within a bicultural nation, we argue that the notion of hauora is domesticated by being aligned with normalising individualistic notions of well-being that reflect the Eurocentric neoliberal individual enterprise subject. Palatable notions of Māori epistemologies as cultural artefacts and iconography drive that ‘inclusion’. The ‘cunning politic’ of (bicultural) recognition legitimates Māori ways of knowing in ways which privilege whiteness – reproducing rather than disrupting networks of power and dumbing down Māori epistemologies.

Emerson, Labor, and Ages of Turbulence

Emerson, Labor, and Ages of Turbulence Andrew Kopec (bio) I was born a seeing eye not a helping hand. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals (1837) When the financial panic of 1837 devastated labor in the United States,1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, like so many antebellum commentators, reflected on this sobering loss in print. “Young men have no hope,” he observed in his May 1837 Journals. “Adults stand like daylaborers idle in the streets. None calleth us to labor.”2 As he probed the issue, however, he came to a surprising realization: although the crisis affected labor, it seemed to be caused by labor as well. He believed in particular that Americans had misunderstood the nature of their work; indeed, they had construed labor as a material—rather than an ideal—process whereby they created salable property. Emerson concluded that this pervasive error, which had turned man into a “money chest,” was the panic’s “causal bankruptcy” (JMN, 5:332). By August 1837, participating in what Nicholas Bromell has described as the era’s “broad cultural contestation of the meaning of work,”3 Emerson sought to reinvigorate labor—scholarly labor in particular—in his now iconic address “The American Scholar,” presenting his notoriously impracticable Transcendentalism as the “remedy” for the panic.4 [End Page 251] Click for larger view View full resolution The Times. Lithograph by Edward Williams Clay, Published by Henry R. Robinson, 1850. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-DIG-ds-04507. [End Page 252] In our own age of turbulence, scholars’ vexed relation to the market drives debate in crisis-ridden humanities departments. A new field devoted to explicating the various crises afflicting the profession—what literary scholar Jeffrey J. Williams terms “critical university studies”—indeed has eclipsed critical theory as the ultimate form of intellection among humanists. Defined as a “gathering place” for work that “that focuses on [sic] the consequences of corporate methods and goals” on the university, especially “corrupting research and increasing managerial (as opposed to academic control)” and, more to the point, “cutting labor through reducing regular faculty positions (while increasing adjunct positions),” critical university studies takes an oppositional stance on these issues.5 Such works proceed in the mode of critique, exposing how corporate logic pervades university administration, research, and teaching. In my view, related to this criticism writ large, in Americanist literary scholarship there is also what David Zimmerman identifies as an ongoing “economic turn.” Commenting on a recent issue of American Literary History devoted to literature and economic crises, Zimmerman asserts that the financial crisis in 2008 has encouraged a revitalized economic criticism, one that seeks a more dynamic account of how economics impinges on literary production than allowed by the “complicity criticism” of the 1990s.6 What animates both the economic turn and critical university studies is a belief in critique’s social efficacy; as Zimmerman observes about Cecilia Tichi’s contribution to the issue, critics now invite “socially relevant economic criticism,” which recognizes that “literary texts are capable of performing [sic] socially progressive work.”7 Writing and lecturing in response to the severe dislocations caused by the panic in the late 1830s, Emerson had such critical ambitions in the antebellum era as well, unfurling an economic program rooted in philosophical Idealism not only in “The American Scholar” but also in several lesser-known addresses from his 1837 and 1838 lecture series. Historicizing Emerson’s panic-era work, in what follows I argue that his work from this turbulent era constitutes an attempt to critique political economy, showing how he imagined the discipline to shape the American [End Page 253] commercial psyche. Previous scholarship has demonstrated that, in Barbara Packer’s words, the 1837 panic led Emerson to explore the individual’s relationship to “his social and economic system,” but here I am interested in how Emerson theorized labor as a process with immaterial implications and I want to argue that Emerson’s panic-era writing sought to exalt in particular scholarly speculation as work.8 “The man of strong Understanding,” Emerson complained in his May 1837 Journals, “always acts unfavorably upon the Man of Reason, disconcerts, and makes him less than he is” (JMN, 5:331...

Chronic Poetics

This essay examines the late work of one poet strongly identified with disability studies in order to offer an account of disability’s role in poetic practice at the turn of the twentieth century. A phenomenological engagement with Larry Eigner’s work demonstrates how traditions of disability studies and formalist discourse can produce a more flexible mode of criticism that incorporates both. What I’m calling chronic poetics extends the reach of disability criticism’s relevance to all bodies, not the disabled body alone. Chronic poetics is a phenomenological account of perception and artistic practice that allows the shared conditions of embodiment to emerge from the text. Thus chronic poetics fulfills the imperatives to significantly address the fact of disability and further to determine whether disability is a meaningful critical frame for thinking about literature.

Goedkoop, Groot, Geïllustreerd - Literatuurkritiek en publieksbemiddeling in Morks’ Magazijn (1910-1942) en “Zij”: Maandblad voor de vrouw (1916-1942)

This article discusses the background, content, mission statements and key contributors of the illustrated magazines Morks’ Magazijn and “Zij”: Maandblad voor de vrouw, both of which sought to make art, science and literature available to a wide reading public. By employing recent conceptualisations of so-called middlebrow magazines and their specific modes of criticism, this article provides an in-depth view of how popular periodicals could shape (and position themselves within) the public sphere at the beginning of the twentieth century and of the role that cultural mediation and literary criticism played in this process.

Edward Said’s Conception of the Intellectual Resistance

This paper attempts to focus on the Saidian intellectual who plays an exemplary role in resisting the ideological misrepresentation that a dominant culture performs over the weak one, which eventually leads to imperialism and colonialism. This resistance is a highly intellectual one and bound with some critical practices on the part of the intellectual himself. Essentially non-coercive in nature, the resistance entails a mode of criticism from him, which is secular in being opposed to dogmatic obsession, amateurist in being free from the traps of professionalism, exilic in having pluralistic viewpoints. The task of resistance also requires an intellectual as critic to consider a cultural artifact like a novel as product of worldly circumstances, which is deeply inflected with the ideological position of the author himself. This, correspondingly, requires a critic to switch from filiative criticism, that texts are traditionally homogenized, to the affiliative one, that they bear the determining imprints of hegemonic influences of cultures, often imperialistic ones. Benefitting from all these insights, an intellectual can participate in a cultural and specifically literary mode of resistance by producing counter- discourse that he terms voyage-in. Eventually, these practices generates a moral courage for a critic and enables him to speak truth to power in all its forms and manifestation.