Nexus Of Discourses Research Articles

Representations of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants in Early Twentieth-Century British Press: Judaism and the Urban Regeneration of London

This paper examines the (mis)representations of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the British newspapers of the early twentieth century. As members of transnational networks, as simple travelers or victims of a forced emigration, Jews pursued economic prospects, freedom from antisemitism or the right to assert their political and cultural liberties while exploring new cities. The migration flows brought them to various European metropolises that were not only observed through the eyes of “the other,” “the stranger,” but also shaped by the cultural articulations of Judaism. Jewish migrants were nonetheless often perceived as dangerous to the ideas of national homogeneity. Positioning itself at the nexus of discourse and experience, a particular focus of this paper is to investigate the manner in which the cultural and religious differences experienced by both Jewish migrants and the settled population were depicted and negotiated, as well as the impact that Jewish immigrants had on the development of the modern city, specifically on London’s East End.

The boob diaries: Discourses of breastfeeding in ‘exclusive pumping’ blogs

This paper uses a feminist discourse analytical approach (Sunderland 2000, 2004; Lazar 2005, 2007) to analyse a set of online blogposts and personal webpages from ‘exclusive pumpers’ (EPers): women who express breastmilk as an alternative to breastfeeding and using infant formula. Using tools from evaluation and stance analysis (Hunston and Thompson, 2000; Bednarek 2006; Myers 2010), I examine how EPers construct opinions about exclusive pumping and breastfeeding. The analysis is centred around three interrelated discourses of exclusive pumping (that are both positively and negatively valued): (1) exclusive pumping as equivalent to breastfeeding; (2) exclusive pumping as a challenge; (3) exclusive pumping as mitigating a failure to breastfeed. This nexus of discourses can be viewed as being underpinned by an ‘overarching’ discourse (Sunderland 2000) of ‘exclusive pumping as abnormal’. The implications of this hegemonic, overarching discourse are discussed in relation to a constructed dichotomy of ‘breastfeeding’ versus ‘bottle feeding’. I show how this dichotomy, and the hegemonic discourse of ‘EPing as abnormal’/’breast is best’ serves to (re)produce discourses of normative motherhood.

Jüngel: A Guide for the Perplexed by R. David Nelson

Reviewed by: Jüngel: A Guide for the Perplexed by R. David Nelson Mark Mattes Jüngel: A Guide for the Perplexed. By R. David Nelson. London: T & T Clark, 2020. xviii + 159 pp. Unquestionably, Eberhard Jüngel is an important contemporary Protestant theologian, but he is not known for his accessibility. He wrote no comprehensive systematic textbook. His German can come across as unwieldy. Nelson opens up Jüngel's theology for a wider audience, including beginners, pastors, and seasoned theologians. Nelson is stellar in his ability elegantly to distill Jüngel's complex theological ideas, present them in their context, and show their relevance for those Protestant theologians eager to be ecumenically minded and desirous to address contemporary secularism. In four chapters, Nelson gives a general overview of Jüngel's theology by traversing four of his most important monographs and eleven of his most essential essays, and summarizing his achievements, challenges, and prospects. Unlike so many mid- to late-twentieth-century thinkers, Jüngel offers no political theology schooled by Karl Marx or his disciple Herbert Marcuse. Jüngel hails from communist East Germany. He experienced firsthand its repression of free speech. Jüngel discovered the church to be a "haven for truth" where one could "speak the truth freely" (4). Reacting against such oppression, Jüngel highlights freedom as the appropriate expression of theology and the gospel as empowering courage (12). Jüngel is indebted to Luther but is no narrow Lutheran confessionalist. Instead he seeks a "constructive Protestant theology" (18), albeit one primarily formulated not like a standard dogmatic textbook but instead through provisional, exploratory essays (21). Nelson eschews the tendency of Jüngel commentators to offer a genealogy outlining intellectual trends which influenced Jüngel. Instead, Jüngel speaks with his "own voice" (27), and therefore we should acknowledge that his thinking arises within a "nexus of discourse" and not "lines of direct intellectual lineage" (29). With this caveat in place, Nelson does an admirable job indicating the impact that the thinking of Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth, Ernst Fuchs, and Martin Heidegger (among others) had on Jüngel. Nelson highlights Jüngel as a critic of the modern tendency of the human to establish its humanity through self-actualization, whether through thought, [End Page 484] action, or feeling. Jüngel retrieves the classical Lutheran stance that humans are fundamentally passive in the hands of their Creator. Famous for his appropriation of the concepts Sprachereignis (speech events) or Wortgeschehen (word happenings), Jüngel contends that God appropriates human language in order to verify his proximity to humankind, expressing himself through various analogies that convey his nearness to the world (48). Theology is accountable to God's word which interrupts daily routine by means of addressing sinners. Most important for Christian witness is the death of Jesus Christ. Jüngel accords much significance—as all Christian theologians should—to this event. At the conceptual level, Jesus' death, as an event within the life of God, shows that metaphysical approaches to God, indebted to Aristotle, are unfounded because they establish a view of God independent of the crucifixion. Hence, Jesus' death means that the metaphysical conception of God must be rejected and that metaphysical assumptions should be revised (40). Salvifically, Jesus' crucifixion also shows, as Karl Barth also understood, that God's being as such (in se) is tantamount to his being for us (pro nobis) (67). With respect to the doctrine of God, Jesus' death entails that God is the "unity of life and death for the sake of life" (73). Nelson points out that, prima facie, Jüngel does not seem to be able to see Jesus as a living, active subject who presently works on our behalf (96), since having died Jesus is absent from us, "withdrawn into the past" (94). Nelson however thinks that Jüngel's contention that the word as an event which accomplishes the advent of God would be a fine way to counter this concern and so restore Christ's present agency, since Christ is risen from the dead. Overall, this is a superb introduction to a profound and challenging contemporary Lutheran theologian. Mark Mattes Grand View University Des...

Approaching Participatory documentary networks and networking

This contribution conceives of interactive documentaries as relational configurations – as a nexus of discourses and practices. By building theory from practice (i.e. two case studies of interactive documentaries), the axioms of Actor Network Theory will be related to actually ‘doing documentary’ like e.g. interventionist media making (e.g. as delineated by Cizek in her Manifesto for Interventionist Media) or Zimmerman and DeMichiel’s reflections on open space documentary. We suggest moving from Actor Network Theory to an Interventionist Networking Methodology and thinking of emerging documentary assemblages not only in terms of hybrid transdisciplinary, transprofessional networks but pragmatic worknets. This can lead to a better understanding of how to deal with unpredicted developments in participatory interactive documentary making in which networking, different agendas and active intervention are foregrounding.en partant

One, two or more? – an examination of the apparition of language and discourse in a Finnish landscape of primary education

ABSTRACT This article sets out to analyze how landscape functions in an educational context. It examines how landscape functions as an irreducible totality and as a nexus of discourse. The article focuses on the materialization of de jure and de facto discourses pertaining to languages in a primary level school in Southwest Finland. It also examines the role of different landscape participants in relation to the materialized discourses. Therefore the purpose of this study is to render visible, not the visible (Klee 1920, 28), focusing not on appearances but on the apparition of materialized discourses (Schein 1997). In order to achieve that, the article provides a concise examination of the relevant core concepts, discourse, discourse materialized and landscape. The results indicate the materialization de jure and de facto discourses on monolingualism and bilingualism, pertaining to Finnish and English. Teachers and staff are largely responsible for the materialization of these discourses.

The Polar Regions as “barometers” in the Anthropocene: towards a new significance of non-state actors in international cooperation?

Rapidly melting sea ice and thereto related access to formerly ice-covered petroleum reserves and future shipping lanes place the Polar Regions (particularly the Arctic) at the nexus of discourses on geopolitics and on the Anthropocene. Against this background, various studies across distinct fields in the social sciences have focused on polar politics mostly from a state-centric perspective but often neglected the growing significance of non-state actors in regional cooperation. This article discusses how state actors who formerly shaped and to this day dominate regional polar politics increasingly rely on the expertise, knowledge and financial resources of non-state actors (NGOs, private actors and rightsholder groups) in order to meet the complex multi-level challenges arising from environmental changes in both Polar Regions. The article relates particularly to the thematic field of oil and gas development, which is regarded as a driver of environmental changes in the Anthropocene and to which the Polar Regions (also known as “Climate Change Barometers” due to their vulnerability to environmental change) are very sensitive. As this is a current concern controversially discussed particularly in view of the changing Arctic (oil and gas development is prohibited in Antarctica at least until 2048), this article draws particularly on empirical findings from policy-making in the Arctic Council. To illustrate the scope of the argument, however, this article also considers the role of non-state actors in the Antarctic Treaty System and shows how through the inclusion of non-state actors political constellations have changed in polar politics. Against this backdrop, this article argues that the growing significance of non-state actors in polar regional cooperation indicates how the general say of state and non-state actors in international politics likely changes in the light of the age of the Anthropocene.

You can lose what you never had

An often-used idiom states: you can't lose what you never had. Yet contrary to this expression, it is possible to lose what you never had – at least when special education support is concerned. In Ontario, as in other jurisdictions, special education exists as a codified system. An ever-changing nexus of discourses and documents – including normalisation, legislation, regulations, and memoranda – set out how special education is to function in the province. The documents themselves articulate how learners' needs are to be formally identified, as well as how students are to be supported. Within this network a phenomenon of non-identification has arisen whereby some students do not get identified and yet would have qualified for special education support had they gone through the process. Yet what leads to this phenomenon? To what does the phenomenon itself lead? Should Ontario's special education system be readjusted to address the phenomenon of non-identification, or is identification itself an inherently flawed practice? To explore these three questions, this paper will analyse Ontario's identification policy, examining what it allows, what it dictates, as well as the challenges it creates.

The Postcolonial Writer in Performance: J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime

This essay focuses on the elaboration of postcolonial literature as an event emerging from the interaction among the many and diverse agencies which allow the postcolonial work to come into being. This formulation both highlights the repetition of tropes in postcolonial literature and the variations to the tropes themselves, which can become ethically and politically relevant by creating an interruption in accepted notions of what a postcolonial work should sound like. Following this lead, the essay will outline a methodological approach which interprets the literary work as a performative act in the complex nexus of discourses constituting the postcolonial writer as a figure of the global collective imaginary, taking as case study J. M. Coetzee’s work with particular focus on his Nobel Prize lecture and the third instalment of his memoir series, Summertime (2009). His work, together with others, is taken as a symptom of how public lectures and statements, together with the literary work proper, have all become an expression of the writer’s own performativity as a writer; while these phenomena have an impact on literature as a whole, the essay focuses on the postcolonial writer figure as historically endowed with what Kobena Mercer has famously termed “the burden of representation.”

The Myth of Masculinity in the Films of Merzak Allouache

The Algerian filmmaker Merzak Allouache has made a series of films that describe the formations of masculinity in Algeria of the post-Independence period. The present paper focuses on three feature films made between the dates of 1976 and 2002, tracing the director's initial framing of mythical discourses of masculinity to an increasingly oppositional and alternative gender construction of the last film. The paper locates a nexus of discourses (colonial, national, Islamist) that inform the construction of masculinity in Algeria. It argues that a critical look at representations of masculinity is central to an analysis of North African identity due to the patriarchal nature of its traditional society, a society which has been in a state of transformation since the colonial and postcolonial periods. The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference—racial and sexual. Such an articulation becomes crucial if it is held that the body is always simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power. (Bhabha, 1994, p. 67)

Madeleine de l’Aubespine: Life, Works, and Auto-Mythography: An Exchange with Ronsard, ca. 1570–80 1

Madeleine de l’Aubespine:Life, Works, and Auto-Mythography: An Exchange with Ronsard, ca. 1570–801 Anna Klosowska In 1587, the posthumous printing of Ronsard's Amours diverses included for the first time among the Gayetez a sonnet praising a woman poet quite forgotten today, Madeleine de l'Aubespine (1546–96).2 That poem is one of the very few in Ronsard's œuvre where he praised a woman for her writing.3 L'Aubespine answered by a sonnet where she compared herself to Phaeton, and called Ronsard "her Apollo" (7).4 Ronsard's reply continued the theme of Phaeton. Only the last tercet of this unpublished sonnet remains:5 Si vollant vous tombez pour me vouloir trop croire Au moings vous acquerez pour tombe ceste gloire Q'une femme a vaincu les plus doctes françois. If, flying, you fall, too willing to believe me, At least you will have earned this glory for your tomb That a woman surpassed the most learned French men. The source of the Ronsard fragment is a nine-page handwritten description (including incipits and quotes) of the lost posthumous manuscript of l'Aubespine's poetry.6 That volume, containing over 4500 lines, disappeared in the fire of the Turin library in 1904.7 However, the description of l'Aubespine's lost volume, especially the incipits, led to the rediscovery of her works contained in other manuscripts, until now considered anonymous or attributed to other (male) poets. I will briefly describe l'Aubespine's life and major works, and then focus on her exchange with Ronsard. Rather than use the topos of feminine modesty, l'Aubespine and Ronsard fashion a national, heroic, [End Page 19] masculine figure of the author: l'Aubespine is Ronsard's successor, the French Phaeton to his French Apollo. Life and Works Louise Labé, a hoax?8 If Labé has a "problem"—as Huchon's recent study claims, she may have not existed, and instead was a fictional character invented and maintained by a group of poets and an eager public that took the bait and responded to the fiction as if it was reality, at the time, and over the centuries—l'Aubespine's "problem" is the opposite: she did exist and write, but had no public that sustained the tradition of reading her works with her name attached to them, into the present time. In view of this opposition, we may ask ourselves what is a canonical author but une créature de papier, a nexus of discourses that actual presence and poetry written in an originary moment in history only anchor but do not determine? I believe we have always answered this question by editing and discussing anew certain forgotten writers, including women. The canon is not a matter of universally recognized beauty, but a matter of maintaining the old or creating new discursive fields that are trendy enough to attract attention. Once a certain critical mass of responses is reached, the field takes on a life of its own. By contrast with Labé, l'Aubespine's life in letters was limited by the nearly intangible practice of writing poetry shared in the ephemeral context of a literary circle. Manuscripts vanish, memories fade, unpublished authors disappear. It took the current confluence of scholars, access, and accidents of preservation, to bring out l'Aubespine's legacy. What will be its assessment? That will be determined in the conversational space formed around her writing: her auctorial and erotic self-fashioning, nothing short of exciting because it emphasizes two trends that go against the stereotype of "feminine modesty": one, the fact that women authors had literary ambitions expressed by myths of creation and author personas that we would consider "masculine," and two, that women in the period read, wrote, and publicly shared erotic poetry, sometimes with lesbian themes; the emergence of her works, of which only a third has been recovered; Colette Winn's uncertain attribution to l'Aubespine of the Cabinet des saines affections;9 Isabelle de Conihout and Pascal Ract-Madoux's discovery of the magnificent bibliothèque évanouie, inventoried at l'Aubespine's death: some three thousand volumes including, for [End Page 20] instance, an Aldus...

"Love's Friend and Stranger to Virginitie": The Politics of the Virginal Body in Ben Jonson's Hymenaei and Thomas Campion's The Lord Hay's Masque

“Love’s Friend and Stranger to Virginitie”: The Politics of the Virginal Body in Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei and Thomas Campion’s The Lord Hay’s Masque Marie H. Loughlin It has become commonplace in studies of the Renaissance masque to cite the famous definition of this genre’s purpose and function which prefaces Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei, a definition which speaks of the “sense” or material aspect of the masque as that which “or doth or should always lay hold on more removed mysteries” at the same time that it also “sound[s] to present occasions.” 1 However, as the critics Stephen Orgel, Jonathan Goldberg, and Leah Marcus among others have warned, there is an important distinction between taking Jonson’s formulation seriously and allowing it to serve as the neoplatonic critical paradigm within which we define the relationship between a masque’s occasion and its “more removed mysteries.” Indeed, many critics have recently demonstrated a desire to problematize this relationship, indicating that it is crucial to recognize not only the interested nature of Jonson’s definition but also our own tendency to treat the masque occasion as an interpretive master-key rather than as a nexus of discourses and ideologies which itself needs unravelling. While such critical interest has resulted in the examination of how particular masque occasions are informed and shaped by a variety of discourses (such as neoplatonism, James’s political project of Anglo-Scottish union, the internal politics of the period’s aristocratic families, and so on), the more broadly cultural contexts of these occasions remain largely unexplored. 2 Since only a book-length study could hope to delineate in any comprehensive way all of the cultural assumptions and discourses which helped fashion such occasions and the dialectic between a specific masque occasion and its performance, this paper will confine its attention to one facet of this complex and contradictory nexus: how early modern contructions of the body and sexuality inform, complicate and occasionally undermine both Hymenaei’s and The Lord Hay’s Masque’s gestures towards various types of ideal unity between king and country, husband and wife, subject and monarch. Although James’s persistent figuring of monarchical [End Page 833] power in familial terms and his emphasis on individual aristocratic marriages as a means of cementing political ties, especially between England and Scotland, lend themselves particularly well to embodiment in these two wedding masques, the problematic and fissured construction of the female virginal body and its desires in early modern England creates serious problems for these two poets’ differing attempts to use marriage and the wedding night as apt symbols of James’s drive for Anglo-Scottish union. Hymenaei’s obsession with the fact of marital defloration is perhaps its most unusual feature, and has attracted some critical attention since this emphasis seems to belie rather than illuminate the central fact of the marriage between Frances Howard and Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex: due to the extreme youth of the participants (13 and 15 years of age, respectively) its physical consummation was to be delayed for three years. However, while David Lindley accounts for Jonson’s insistence on the lawful defloration of the wedding night as an embarrassing miscalculation which distorts “the reality of the young couple” in favour of the poet’s aesthetic and political goals as well as his desire to demonstrate his classical “scholarship,” clearly Jonson is also motivated by Frances Howard’s anomalous social and cultural position as virginal wife. 3 He attempts to elide this suspension, the long delay between marital vow and physical consummation, precisely by insisting upon the immediate causal link of marriage ceremony and marital defloration, by using the generically conventional references to defloration which occur in all Renaissance wedding masques and making them the central focus of the action and verse. From the masque’s outset, Reason emphasizes the natural conclusion of the marriage rites in the sexual activity of the wedding night, noting that the major symbols presented (the altar and the fire and water) all refer to the physical union of the couple in marital intercourse. Although the couple are separate at the altar of Juno, “this happy night” they will...

Girls and Crisis - The Other Side of Diversion

This essay will examine a group of early texts by Siegfried Kracauer that pertain to the cinema and the pleasures it invites. Situating film in relation to other phenomena of modern life, these texts map out a landscape of desire and its modes of production. In doing so, they could contribute to a conceptualization of a history of pleasure, as Thomas Elsaesser has suggested for the study of Weimar cinema in a recent essay.2 Kult der (Cult of Diversion), Die kleinen Ladenmadchen gehen ins Kino (The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies) and Das Ornament der Masse (The Mass Ornament) are central texts which are not only long overdue for critical evaluation of Kracauer's writings in the United States they also invite an examination of the structuring of desire that is highly relevant today. Kracauer's central category in this enterprise is the concept of diversion by which the cinema is thrown into a nexus of discourses that is torn between modern regression and radical change. As a handy attribute, the term Zerstreuung (diversion)3 acquired fashionable status in the 1920s, recurring on the pages of the bourgeois press, and elegantly combining disdain for the new medium and its uncultivated adherents with an obsessive fascination. Kracauer was one of the first to pay serious attention to the mechanisms of diversion which he closely