Political Parallel Research Articles

Measured Life: Making Live, the “Modern System of Science,” and the Animated Bodies of Frankenstein

Abstract This article considers Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein through what Sara Guyer calls “biopoetics,” hybridizing biopolitical and romantic reading strategies, and positing that romantic writing arises in temporal, theoretical, and political parallel with the movement of power from the reign of the sovereign to the realm of biopower. I focus on how Frankenstein imagines the flesh of Victor as animated and directed forward through biopower, by way of the novel’s juxtaposed medico-scientific and romantic discourse of life. Through close readings of the creation scene and Victor’s final breaths aboard Walton’s exploratory Arctic ship, I conclude that Frankenstein at last offers itself both as artifact and archaeology of modern power—or what Guyer calls “literature as a form of biopower.”

A Satirical Magazine in Its Own Way”: Politicisation and Dissent in Gırgır (1972-1983)

The satirical weekly Gırgır, founded by Oğuz Aral in 1972, has been Turkey’s best-selling satirical magazine of all times. Characterized by a multitude of genres and styles, its contents ranged from written jokes to comics and political cartoons. Such diversity has prompted scholars to present this magazine in different, often contrasting ways, especially with reference to the nature and strength of its satire. This study intends to contribute to solving the ambiguity concerning whether Gırgır’s caricatures and cartoons may be deemed political or not. For this purpose, it focuses on its satirical repertoire from its early days up to the end of the military regime of 1980 to 1983, the most challenging time in terms of freedom of expression and dissent. This article argues that satire in Gırgır became increasingly political parallel to the growing politicisation of society in the 1970s and that the magazine did not bow to political pressure under the military rule. Especially its reactions to the repressive climate of the regime allow us to define its satire as political.

Idiotypic Networks, Normative Networks

Idiotypic Networks, Normative Networks

The Internationalization of Singapore Politics

Singapore's periodic conflicts with the foreign media and human rights groups took a significant turn during 1995, when an opposition leader's willingness to fraternize with the government's critics abroad highlighted the external domain's relevance to domestic politics in an altered global environment. Though the dominance of the People's Action Party (PAP), which has ruled the country since 1959, remained unchallenged under Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, this development could have important implications in the longer run for the city-state, whose remarkable economic success has been accompanied by a marked degree of official control over the terms and parameters of political discourse and contestation. Its significance lay in its backdrop, a wave of demo cratization, working its way through the post-Soviet world order which has seen a number of authoritarian countries in Asia liberalize politically in recent years. Interventions by foreign human rights groups, the media, and sometimes polit icians, increasingly meshing in with the United States' desire to police the political morals of the world, have encouraged the process. Though the actual extent of their contribution to change is debatable, their activities have accentuated the process of liberalization which attests to a trend towards political globalization running parallel with the economic, both being based on American values and leadership triumphant in the contest with the Soviet Union. This trend pro vided the context in which Singapore's political arena and its judicial institu tions came under intensified external pressure during the year. While the scrutiny was not new, what lent it a certain weight in Singapore politics was the opposition's response to it. Central to that response was the controversial readi ness of Chee Soon Juan, who is secretary-general of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), to utilize external forums in his pursuit of political goals within the country.1 It is perhaps not overstating the case to see that linkage as marking a stage in the internationalization of Singapore's politics. The internationalization occurred also in the context of a debate between the Singapore leadership and supporters of the liberal-democratic model over the issue of Asian values. The state's emphatic advocacy of hard work, thrift and the ability to place the community above the self ? values which it considers to be

The Culture of Literacy, and: The Contingency of Theory: Pragmatism, Expressivism, and Deconstruction (review)

Reviewed by: The Culture of Literacy, and: The Contingency of Theory: Pragmatism, Expressivism and Deconstruction Wallace Martin Wlad Godzich. The Culture of Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. viii + 317 pp. $49.95 cloth, $18.95 paper. Gary Wihl. The Contingency of Theory: Pragmatism, Expressivism and Deconstruction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. xiv + 215 pp. $27.50 cloth. Those who looked forward to the appearance of essays by Wlad Godzich in the 1980s will be gratified to have them here collected. Despite the variety of the occasions that prompted them, they can now be seen as tesserae composing a theoretical mosaic of remarkable scope. The patterns of his thought emerge from his interest in the relationship between language and literacy-the latter conceived as “a determinate set of relations that we have to language.” Godzich reinvigorates the semiological project proposed by Saussure but forsaken by his heirs: that of exploring the social functioning of language in its historical and rhetorical actualizations. This project can link deconstruction, cultural criticism, and third-world literatures in a coherent and compelling design, linguistic practice providing the common ground of their articulation. For the key terms frequently evoked by poststructuralists (difference, otherness, power, hegemony), Godzich would substitute the cry and the echo (in his introduction) and the communal understanding implied in Kant’s treatment of the “given” (in the last chapter). Any universalizing tendency is stopped short by his insistence that historical reflection must accompany any act of understanding. Rather than trying to integrate current theoretical trends (thus blurring their singularities), he links them together at points where they can fruitfully interact. The first three chapters-on Hans Robert Jauss, historiography, and popular culture in the early modern period-show how Jauss’s aesthetics of reception can lead to a new understanding not only of literary and cultural history, but of the shifting relations between literature and state power. The model Godzich develops to characterize mass, elite, and popular culture, along with his distinctions between oral, aural, and written communication, provide an alternative way to map modernism. Here we find a wealth of proposals that could prove rewarding for those interested in the overdue project of rewriting literary history. The social and literary transformations that accompanied [End Page 423] the onset of printing in England, Germany and France deserve the attention that Godzich has given to Spain. For the classical period, Pindar (oral), Horace (aural), and Catullus could provide a poetic and political parallel. Three essays on narrative follow those on literary history. Godzich traces the breakdown of the structural and linguistic models that treated stories as formal objects transmitting messages from one subject to others. From the dismantling of this scheme, stories emerge as examples of human action in which the question of agency again looms large, as it does in history and in life. When used to project possible courses of action, stories precipitate a moment of decision in which time breaks loose from its commonsense and philosophic entailments. The next section contains four essays on Paul de Man, one of them written for this book. Here as elsewhere, Godzich is as interested in contexts as in particular texts. In one section, he relates de Man’s thought to the dialectic of modernity; another contains a revealing survey of literary pedagogy and theory. Those who have been disappointed with other treatments of de Man are likely to find this one rewarding. Having consumed and digested other theorists in earlier chapters, Godzich undertakes production in the two on semiotics. His most important thesis solicits comparison with Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text (1977). The book concludes with treatments of three themes, interlaced in four chapters: the legitimation of institutions; the relation between sociopolitical upheavals and the disciplinary structures that would understand them; and the constitution of comparative literature as a “field” that might expand its horizons by learning to see itself as it appears to those others who live outside its current borders. Godzich’s thoughts on these subjects will repay the attention of political and cultural critics; they also bear comparison with the ideas of thinkers as varied as Kojève, Leo Strauss, and René Girard. For insights into current theory and...

Gulliver's Travels and the Mode of Political Parallel During Walpole's Administration

In choosing to write first part of Gulliver's Travels as a political parallel, Swift had more to think about than mere invention of Lilliputian analogues for Whig misdeeds. For by 1726, parallel had been in almost constant use for two generations in all degrees of literature, from most elevated tragedies to humblest ballads, and so, in a sense, had taken on a life of its own. Readers approached it with certain attitudes and expectations derived from years of familiarity with current work in this mode, and best writers sought ways to manipulate these expectations to literary and rhetorical advantage. Swift's parallel in Gulliver's Travels has not suffered in recent years from critical neglect; but our failure to recognize its position in history of its mode has, I think, caused us to overlook much of its subtlety and humor. Though no one can pretend to understand it exactly as did its first audience, I hope by providing a brief account of parallel in 1720s and 1730s to sketch in a background against which Swift's workmay appear more clearly. Political parallel had reached a peak of prestige in 1713, when two parties advanced rival political interpretations of Addison's Cato.' In following year, however, Tories fell from power and nature of parallel began to change as Whigs consolidated their authority. In these years, according to Laurence Hanson, the discouragement of direct writing which law imposed was to effect a considerable change in character of English journalism. The taut phraseology of Defoe gave way to a verbosity which aimed primarily at wrapping up meaning sufficiently to avoid possibility of arrest.2 Thus parallel became a common device in pamphlets and journal essays, and its overuse in such contexts entailed a loss of rhetorical power and literary prestige. Even subtlety and irony through which such writers as Otway and Dryden had been able to transcend hackneyed figures from which less clever poets made their parallels became