Sense Of Irony Research Articles

Mocking while working with problematic representations: The irony of ethnographic sensibility in Indonesia

SummaryIn this essay, I contemplate the value of ethnography by reflecting on my experience and that of other anthropology‐trained individuals who engage with public socio‐ecological issues in Indonesia. While these issues are portrayed as urgent and are packaged with established representations of people and communities, ethnographic engagement produces representations that are at odds with them. Nevertheless, anthropology‐trained individuals in Indonesia have no way to address these issues other than to work with institutions that produce the problematic representations, and in doing so, inadvertently contribute to their reproduction. Furthermore, the academic anthropology ecosystem does not support the exhaustive exploration of these issues. Eventually, the sensibility generated by the practice of ethnography becomes more of a latent sensibility, which is critical of the predominant representations. It evokes internal conflict and a sense of irony, which most of the time cannot be expressed or practically addressed.

Yugoslavia's Last Monuments

Yugoslavia's Last Monuments Christopher Linforth (bio) THE ERASURE of spomeniks began little more than a decade after Marshal Tito's death in 1980. The president of Yugoslavia had commissioned the construction of these Space Age monuments after the brutal Axis occupation of his homeland. Tito envisioned a new Soviet-style mythos for Yugoslavia—one rooted in futuristic utopianism. His embrace of this aesthetic, perhaps unusual for someone born in the small village of Kumrovec, aided his decades-long quest to unify his people. Using brutalist design principles, Tito's architects memorialized the socialist federal republic's dead and those who fought the invasion: his Partisan army. Over thirty years, thousands of these outsized concrete spomeniks appeared across the Yugoslavian landscape. Often built in remote locations, at battle sites or places of patriotic heroism, these monuments dwarfed their surroundings. In today's Republika Srpska, the Monument to the Battle of Sutjeska at Tjentište sits in a pleasant green valley, occasionally visited by glum-faced schoolchildren and hikers seeking to conquer the nearby peak of Sniježnica. The jagged dual wings of this spomenik, each some nineteen meters high, resemble a giant hunk of stratified limestone cleaved in two. Inside the poured concrete façade lies an unseen cagelike rebar structure. Not far away in the other entitized form of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the skeletal remains of another spomenik sit atop Mt. Makljen. Monument to the Battle for the Wounded (sometimes known as The Fist) commemorates the Partisan soldiers who defended the mountain pass from Axis troops. The blocky abstract fist rose to a height of fourteen meters and was painted white—a symbol of defiance against the fascist invasion. Decades later, in 2000, local vandals dynamited the spomenik; they blasted the concrete shell away and left only a rig of smoldering rebar. In the eyes of many, the brightness of Tito's utopian socialist realism faded dramatically during the Yugoslav Wars. The rallying call of a single Slav state felt hollow, meaningless, with so many dead. And spomeniks were a reminder of the false unity of the past. Indeed, the towering hubris of these monuments was starkly evident. The wars reignited the Balkans' historic factions—Serbs, Croats, Kosovans, Macedonians, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Montenegrins—to raise again past grudges and the specter of bloody nationalism. On the lips of the citizens of this dissoluted republic were places of mass death and ethnic cleansing: Batajnica, Vukovar, Bihac, Srebrenica. Click for larger view View full resolution Through the 1990s and 2000s, hundreds of spomeniks were vandalized or destroyed or left to crumble away. Visit Košute, Drvar, or Kamenska to see slabs of broken concrete strewn across the landscape. Colorful graffiti is the only sign people still visit these areas. In other places, some spomeniks have been replaced by churches or new monuments documenting the victims of the wars. Plaques on these new monuments often revisit the resentments of the former Yugoslavia. Unresolved trauma is on full display. In recent years, there has been a worldwide interest in the most famous spomeniks, such as the stylized winged monument at Podgaric, a memorial to a local rebellion against the fascist Ustaše. Concurrently, within the former Yugoslavia, a growing fondness for the republic can be seen in hip café-bars, art exhibitions, even on reality television. Titostalgia draws upon a rose-tinted view of Tito's benevolence: his futuristic dream of a forward-looking and powerful Yugoslavia. Younger generations have started to valorize his life and work; they imagine a Golden Age of better times and when people said "brotherhood and unity" without a sense of irony. The spomeniks speak to these dreamers. These last monuments point the way to reconciliation: a future for them all. [End Page 9] Christopher Linforth Christopher Linforth is the author of three story collections, The Distortions (2022), winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize; Directory (2020); and When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (2014). Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Benjamin G. White. Pain and Paradox in 2 Corinthians: The Transformative Function of Strength in Weakness

Benjamin G. White. <i>Pain and Paradox in 2 Corinthians: The Transformative Function of Strength in Weakness</i>

Herrman S. Saroni: Paths to Success as a Composer in New York, 1844–52

Herrman S. Saroni: Paths to Success as a Composer in New York, 1844–52

"Playing Back the Dissonances": The Battle of Manassas in Context

Before every performance, enslaved pianist-composer Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins would introduce his Battle of Manassas as a programmatic depiction of the titular Confederate victory. With sharply juxtaposed fragments of Northern and Southern tunes, along with drum motifs, bugle calls, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and vocal enactments of trains and whistles—all continually interrupted by sudden “cannon fire” in the left hand—Wiggins would finish the piece shouting “Retreat! Retreat! Retreat!” at the top of his lungs before leaving two irreverent slams of the keys to reverberate throughout the hall. Famous for his lifelong ability to perfectly imitate any music, noise, or speech he heard, Wiggins amazed his audiences for decades claiming to represent Manassas’s events exactly as he heard them described to him. But over 150 years after its premiere, scholars have tended to detect a sense of irony, if not total subversion, in the enslaved pianist’s chaotic Confederate homage. My research considers recent interpretations of the piece with an eye toward its compositional circumstances, including its supposed timeline, its printed foreword’s odd reversal of an anthem’s Southern affiliation, and its likely response to a contemporaneous battle piece by Northern pianist-composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk.

Riding East—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in Hidalgo (2004)

<i>Riding East</i>—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in <i>Hidalgo</i> (2004)

Where Was Everyone? The Fatal Siloing of Abortion Advocacy

Where Was Everyone? The Fatal Siloing of Abortion Advocacy Meaghan Winter (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution On December 13, 2021, activists with ShutDownDC held a candlelight vigil to draw attention to the Supreme Court's attack on abortion rights and mark the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. (Alex Wong/Getty Images) [End Page 100] I briefly dated a man who told me that he thought abortion should be legal but “didn’t think it should be used as birth control” and later, with no sense of irony, argued with me and then became so angry that I was frightened when I insisted that we use a condom. I bring this up for a couple of reasons. First, public writing about abortion is usually either personal and confessional or, more often, legalistic, political, and abstracted from what abortion is really about—people’s bodies, the most private aspects of their lives, and the bargains, dilemmas, and battles, small and large, that cisgender women face as a matter of course. Second, abortion is usually framed as a women’s issue, and it does, of course, foremost affect women. But straight men of my generation have also built their lives—lives often defined by enormous freedoms—on access to contraception and abortion. Those of us who came of age after Roe v. Wade have rarely had to reflect on how legal abortion has shaped our most basic assumptions about our lives. If you’ve grown up in a country with legal abortion, and particularly if you’re a straight man, I ask that you pause and imagine what your private life would have been like if had you faced the real possibility of creating a pregnancy that couldn’t be terminated every time you had sex. Consider everything that makes up your life—degrees or jobs, yes, but also your friendships, marriages, turns in the road, children born because they were wanted, whatever you value—and appreciate how much of it was made possible by living in a society where abortion was legal and often presumed accessible. The right to have an abortion is in peril. This spring, the Supreme Court will hand down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, the most pivotal abortion case in fifty years. Under consideration is Mississippi’s ban on abortions after fifteen weeks, which the state legislature passed in 2018. According to the central holding of Roe, all pre-viability bans are unconstitutional, which includes a fifteen-week ban. The only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi, Jackson Women’s Health, sued the state, asking courts to block the law. A district court and then the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit [End Page 101] (which is infamously conservative) sided with the clinic. The state appealed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments. Dobbs should be an open-and-shut case, and before 2020 it would have been. The only way for the Court to allow Mississippi its fifteen-week ban is to defy decades of precedent and gut the core of Roe. The mere fact that the Supreme Court decided to hear Dobbs is an ominous sign. Usually, the Court will take up a case when the lower federal courts disagree over whether a law is constitutional. In this case, the federal courts agree; they have consistently squashed total pre-viability bans because fifty years of precedent clearly prohibits them. For decades, the Court hasn’t bothered to take up abortion cases that obviously defy Roe. What has changed is the political makeup of the Court, particularly following Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett. Her nomination, like those of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh before her, was not an accident of history. The Trump administration was able to remake the judiciary for at least a generation, installing an unprecedented number of federal judges and three Supreme Court justices, because leaders of the conservative movement have spent forty years and millions of dollars to incubate a legal establishment that would shrink the power of the federal government, give more leeway to states and corporations, and prioritize conservative social views and textual interpretations of the Constitution. One powerful group, the...

Revisiting the Falklands-Malvinas Question: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Revisiting the Falklands-Malvinas Question: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

IRONY AND CRITICISM IN MAURIZIO CATTELAN'S WORKS

21. yüzyıl sanatını anlamak ve anlamlandırmak, modern sanatın temel ilkelerinin ve kavramlarının nasıl konumlandırıldığı ile ilişkilidir. Öncü sanat akımlarının yolu açtığı gerçeğini yadsımadan bu ilişkiler zinciri kurulduğunda günümüz sanatı daha anlaşılır olacaktır. Günümüz sanatı, dünya gerçekliğinin bir yansıması olarak ele alınmaktadır. Sanatçılar, küratörler ve koleksiyonerler açısından sanat, toplum yaşamını gösteren güncel meselelerle ilişkilendirildiğinde anlam ve beğeni kazanmaktadır. Sanat eserleri de yerel ve evrensel meselelerin ele alındığı ve eleştirildiği ölçüde dikkat çekmektedir. Var olan ve olmuş olan gerçekler ve bu gerçeklerin ironi duygusuyla birlikte eleştirisi üzerinden eserlerini kurgulayan İtalyan sanatçı Maurizio Cattelan, 20. yüzyıl modern sanat akımlarının temel ilkelerini harmanlayarak günümüz sanatında kendisine yer edinmiş ve hatırı sayılır derecede dikkatleri üzerine çekmiş bir sanatçıdır. Eserlerinde rastlantıya yer vermeyen sanatçı, gerek doldurulmuş hayvanlardan oluşan enstalasyonlarını gerekse balmumu heykellerini özenle meydana getirmektedir. Bu eserlerin, içinde anlam kazanacağı mekânları dikkatlice seçerek kendine özgü bir sergileme düzeni sunmaktadır. Bu eserler, mekân-kurum-anlam ilişkisi çerçevesinde sanatın bugünkü konumunun işaretçileri olarak örnek teşkil etmektedir. &#x0D; Bu makalede Cattelan’ın eserlerinin, günümüz sanatının şimdiki halinin anlamlandırılması bakımından önemi vurgulanmış ve bu eserler, sanat kurumları başta olmak üzere toplumsal, siyasi ve dini diğer kurumlarla olan ilişkilerinin belirlenmesi amacıyla yeni bir bakış açısı ile ele alınmıştır.

No longer bond’s girl: Historical displacements of the top female spy in 1960s taiyupian

When the 1960s Bond craze reached Taiwan, the taiyupian produced a hugely popular new archetype: the female 007. Although the films in this sub-genre evoked Bond’s code name of 007, Bond gadgets, and high-stakes espionage, they reversed the gender of the top spy. This was dramatized in the narrative through the hidden identity of 007, who is often a glamorous female figure embedded in enemy ranks and swoops in in masked attire to save her team of agents. Meanwhile, the top male spy remains in the dark and believes it is his role to take responsibility for the team. Often 007’s lover, he is ultimately proved incompetent and dependent upon her prowess as top spy; his role, too, is a reversal of gender and agency. This paper explores the cinematic history and context for this gender irony. With close readings of 1964’s Female Agent No.7 and The Best Secret Agent, I argue that the female action lead had a radically different meaning in taiyupian as compared to British and American cinemas, or even other Sinophone and East Asian cinemas, due to its resonance with a specifically Taiwanese narrative of historical redemption. Furthermore, the reversal of 007’s gender points to the taiyupian’s sense of irony regarding its marginal status among other cinemas, and its embrace of the element of surprise inherent in the outsider’s role.

An American Jeremiad: John C. Burnham and the History of Science Popularization

An American Jeremiad: John C. Burnham and the History of Science Popularization

“But He Could Not Warm Himself”: Sexual Innuendo and the Place of 1 Kgs 1,1-4

ABSTRACTSpringing off recent articles by Richard Hess and Russell Meek, this essay argues for the collaboration of vv. 1b and 4 to suggest that 1 Kgs 1,1-4 is concerned with discussing David’s impotency. In light of this physiological development, David’s attendants embarked on a search for a virgin. The Sumerian folktale “The Old Man and the Young Girl” may provide illumination for such an endeavor as it testifies to a perception that young women could rejuvenate impotent men. As for Adonijah’s pursuit of the throne, one can interpret a causative, albeit it implicit, relationship between 1,1-4 and vv. 5ff. David’s impotence rendered him unable to fulfill certain diplomatic duties, which had been a hallmark of his reign and rise to power. Such a development cast a shadow over the future of the administration, and ultimately, these four verses establish a sense of irony that will be revisited periodically throughout the history.

What's Mine Isn't (and Neither is What's Yours): Desire as Debt, the Lacanian Lack, and the Boonian Gift

This very brief essay is structured by the claim that James Boon's work suggests the radical idea that Lacanian desire is Mauss's debt. Boon makes any ethics, discourse, or materiality always between, only existing in the paradoxical turning of a distinction toward its absence elsewhere (and vice versa). I juxtapose texts by Boon, Lacan, and Freud to hear how each emphasizes a paradox that is latent or absent in the other—I listen for each other's alternating sounds. And I explore what this means for epistemological uses of sexuality, the good, and jouissance. Reading through Žižek and Boon on antinomies of the feminine, the masculine, and their others, I argue that Boon allows a relational androgyny missing in Žižek's ouvre. Boon's sense of the carnivalesque makes for an analytic that ties misery to ecstasy, the abject to laughter. I speculate that this tradition suggests that our anthropological empathies might bespeak repressed desire. And I end with Boon's sense of irony, an ethics of debt toward even what is being renounced. My interest then is to explore the ways Boon's notion of exchange offers an ethics that is deeply—and richly—unsettling of some of what we hold dear.

Africultures Dossier: &lt;em&gt;La Permanence / On Call&lt;/em&gt;, by Alice Diop

La Permanence / On Call, by Alice Diop Olivier Barlet Translated by Beti Ellerson In competition at the Cinéma du Réel Film Festival in Paris (March 2016) where it received the Institut Francais Louis Marcorelles Award, La Permanence / On Call is a film that makes a difference and is necessary as an increasingly fearful Europe faces the influx of refugees and migrants. In a small doctor's office, a fixed camera is placed on one side or the other of the room, allowing either the practitioner or the patient to be seen. How is it that the viewer remains glued to the screen for more than an hour and a half with such a minimalist approach? Transfixed, moved, and in total empathy with those men and women, their pain, their suffering. This is no doubt what Alice Diop felt from the impact of hearing about these dramatic experiences that speak of the terrible evolution of a world where violence has become commonplace. Initially her feelings, which she aptly conveys to us without pathos but with the meticulousness of her craft, become our own. She is discreetly present, as is her sound engineer, whose hands, at one point, are in view at the edge of the screen in an attempt to put a smile on the face of a baby. Diop and her sound engineer are not trying to conceal themselves. A patient looks at them and asks, "Are you still here? Do you go to other hospitals or just this one?" He also admires the work of the boom operator: "All day, it's heavy!" As in a film by Chantal Akerman, time is an asset. A static shot of a wall, a door, a chair and the top of a desk, compels us, in terms of duration, to focus on the details: the dilapidated walls, the oldness of the equipment. We are at the public hospital. This doctor, who has a sense of irony, notes that because of the lack of funds, there is a shortage of prescription pads. This doctor is one of these modern heroes, anonymous and invisible, who give themselves to their task, with the means available. Assisted by a psychiatrist and a social worker, he maintains the Permanent Access to Healthcare (Permanence d'accès aux soins de sante, PASS), a basic service at Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny. This doctor is the only one in Seine Saint-Denis that offers consultations without appointments for newly arrived migrants, often [End Page 269] without social security and pending administrative decision on their status in France. When a refugee gets asylum, he or she is happy, though it is rare to hear, "This is a new life, everything will go well now!" This immediately tempered by, "Well, almost." We spend an hour and a half with the doctor and the stream of patients, some of whom become familiar to us. Concentrated, the doctor listens to their hopes, often concerning a certificate necessary for the next step, or drugs that may distance them a bit from their suffering and their anguish. Entering through this little door, waiting patiently in the austere waiting room, are the effects of the harshness of the world, seen far beyond the door. Marked on their faces and visible in their gazes and silences is the precariousness of their situation in France, often without income or housing, lacking sleep as they are forced to slumber in parks, and the traces of the violence that they have fled. Can we not accommodate all the misery in the world? Perhaps not, but how are we doing our part, we who have historically provoked the largest global division of wealth and power? In his broken English or Spanish, the doctor communicates somehow with those who have not yet learned French. Neither superiority nor condescension in his relationships. And especially not a belief of what is or should be the other. In his presence, his comments, his questions, while continuing respectfully without a judgment of otherness, he positions himself as an alter ego, as a fellow human being. When a lady living at Emmaus1 shows her fingers deformed by osteoarthritis, the doctor responds: "I have the same...

Royce Rolls by Margaret Stohl

Reviewed by: Royce Rolls by Margaret Stohl Karen Coats Stohl, Margaret Royce Rolls. Freeform, 2017 [400p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4847-3233-5 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4847-3570-1 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 After five seasons of a reality show featuring her outspoken mother, Mercedes, fashionista sister, Porsche, and CGB (cute gay brother), Maybach, Bentley Royce [End Page 427] feels more like a character than a real person. She longs to end the charade and, with ratings tanking, she realizes that she might just get her wish. That could be financial disaster for the family, though, so she's on board when Porsche pitches the idea of a wedding to save the show—or so it seems in a plot of layered deceptions. When it becomes clear that Porsche is falling in real love with her fake fiancé, Bentley realizes it's time to blow up the whole deal to save her family. Mixed with fictional news items from celebrity internet rags, the details of the show's final season and Bentley's off-screen life are cannily peppered with footnotes from the top network executive and his assistant regarding proposed edits for product placement and self-protective, self-promoting word changes in what they obviously worry will be a very public document in the end. The technique hilariously confirms all of the negative stereotypes of LA while allowing Bentley's character to emerge with an engaging sympathy. The cynical flares aimed at reality programming and its stars might cause mild discomfort to their religious devotees, but teens with a sense of irony will hoot at the caustic sendups of the branding, spin, and OTT antics that keep celebrities in the public eye. Fans of Bray's Beauty Queens (BCCB 6/11) will find this laugh-out-loud outrageous as well as oddly charming. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Virgin soil in irony research: Personality, humor, and the “sense of irony”.

he aim of the paper is fourfold: (a) show why humor scholars should study irony, (b) explore the need for considering interindividual differences in healthy adults’ irony performance, (c) stress the necessity for developing tools assessing habitual differences in irony performance, and (d) indicate future directions for joint irony and humor research and outline possible applications. Verbal irony is often employed with a benevolent humorous intent by speakers, but can also serve as a means of disparagement humor. In both cases, encoding and decoding activities entailing irony need to be considered in the context of the psychology of humor. We argue that verbal irony performance can be considered a phenomenon native to the realm of humor and individual differences. We point out that research has widely neglected the meaningfulness of variance in irony performance within experimental groups when looking at determinants of irony detection and production. Based on theoretical considerations and previous empirical findings we show that this variance can be easily related to individual-differences variables such as the sense of humor, dispositions toward laughter and ridicule (e.g., gelotophobia), and general mental ability. Furthermore, we hypothesize that there is an enduring trait determining irony performance we will label the sense of irony. The sense of irony possibly goes along with inclinations toward specific affective and cognitive processing patterns when dealing with verbal irony. As an application, novel irony performance tests can help to study psychological and neurophysiological correlates of irony performance more feasibly, that is, in nonclinical groups.

Understanding Jerusalem and its Cross-Cultural Dilemmas in Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem: Chronicles From the Holy City

Abstract Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2011) is a nonfictional graphic novel which narrates the experiences during a year that the Canadian artist and his family spent living far from home, in the occasionally dangerous and perilous city of the ancient Middle East. Part humorous memoir filled with “the logistics of everyday life,” part an inquisitive and sharp-eyed travelogue, Jerusalem is interspersed with enthralling lessons on the history of the region, together with vignettes of brief strips of Delisle’s encounters with expatriates and locals, with Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities in and around the city, with Bedouins, Israeli and Palestinians. Since the comic strip is considered amongst the privileged genres able to disseminate stereotypes, Jerusalem tackles cultural as well as physical barriers, delimiting between domestic and foreign space, while revealing the historical context of the Israeli-Palestinian present conflict. Using this idea as a point of departure, I employ an imagological method of interpretation to address cross-cultural confusions in analysing the cartoonist’s travelogue as discourse of representation and ways of understanding cultural transmission, paying attention to the genre’s convention, where Delisle’s drawing style fits nicely the narrative techniques employed. Through an imagological perspective, I will also pay attention to the interaction between cultures and the dynamics between the images which characterise the Other (the nationalities represented or the spected) and those which characterise - not without a sense of irony - his own identity (self-portraits or auto-images). I shall take into account throughout my analysis that the source of this graphic memoir is inevitably a subjective one: even though Delisle professes an unbiased mind-set from the very beginning, the comic is at times coloured by his secular views. Delisle’s book is a dark, yet gentle comedy, and his wife’s job at the Doctors Without Borders paired with his personal experiences are paradoxically a gentle reminder that “There’ll always be borders.” In sum, the comic medium brings a sense of novelty to the imagological and hermeneutic conception of the interpretation of cultural and national stereotypes and/or otherness in artistic and literary works.

Film Review: American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, by Grace Lee

Grace Lee American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, 2013, LeeLee Films. It is difficult to reconcile the opening images of Grace Lee's film American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs with its opening monologue. As a seemingly fragile old woman pushes a walker past the desolate ruins of Detroit's Packard plant, we hear her say, 'I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit.' The initial temptation is to read the opening ironically, as in Mark Binelli's (2012) Detroit City is the Place to Be, or any of the other versions of Detroit as urban dystopia that plague our popular consciousness. This sense of irony is reinforced by the filmmaker's frequent use of dissolves that juxtapose images of Detroit's past as a bustling, thriving, racially segregated metropolis with its present as a partially deserted majority black city. However, irony is not a trope to describe the life of activist, thinker and revolutionary Grace Lee Boggs. And as the film unfolds, it is clear that Grace Lee the filmmaker loves Grace Lee Boggs, her subject and namesake, too much to simply impose such an irony. Lee Boggs loves her adopted hometown, and that love is the very antithesis of irony: it is passionate, committed, and frequently, it seems from the backdrops of gutted homes and burned-out businesses that texture this film, unrequited. And so viewers are left to ponder: if not irony, then what does Lee Boggs mean when, in surveying the devastation, she remarks, and this is a symbol of how giants fall'? The giants Grace Lee Boggs has seen fall are many. As a testament to a life lived at the intersection of every radical movement and revolution that has come to define the 20th century, American Revolutionary traces a life that embodies all of the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the project of revolutionary change. Born Grace Lee in 1915, she trained as a philosopher but was unable, as a Chinese-American woman, to find academic employment due to the racism and sexism of the 1930s. Lee Boggs found her way to Marxism through her work in Chicago's black community, where she came under the influence of C.L.R. James. Arising out of her experience in Chicago and the influence of James, she came to see the black community as the lynchpin to building an American revolutionary movement. However, she also became convinced that James and fellow Trotskyite Raya Dunayevskaya were mired in patterns of thinking inherited from the Russian Revolution, and so she came to Detroit, then ground zero of working-class politics and therefore revolutionary politics, to edit the socialist newspaper Correspondence. It was to be written by the social forces she saw as being at the forefront of a new American Revolution: blacks, women and youth. And it was in Detroit that she met the revolutionary autodidact and Chrysler line worker, James 'Jimmy' Boggs, and began an enduring life partnership with him, committed to thinking through, and perhaps fomenting, the next American Revolution. Inspired by Malcolm X, black nationalism and the black power movements, Grace and Jimmy became instrumental in organising the African-American community in what was then, and remains, the most racially segregated city in the USA. …

Post-Holocaust Representations of Poland in Israeli Literature

Abstract The article discusses different images of Poland in post-Holocaust Hebrew literature. These texts portray journeys to Poland as a means of constructing a self-identity. Poland is a perfect place for such a search. It is the soil on which many Jews lived for centuries and where a large portion of the Jewish people was exterminated in World War II. Poland is, on the one hand, the place of origin and, on the other hand, the place where an entire civilization came to an end. The article distinguishes two main waves in journeys to Poland in Israeli literature. The first wave was the first encounter with Communist or Postcommunist Poland as it awakened to a new world. This wave was composed primarily of “second-generation” writers who were trying to construct their own identity and memory from the remnants of the destroyed Jewish world. For them, the journey to Poland was first and foremost a journey to the valley of death. The second wave was of Israeli writers who traveled to the same “void” as their predecessors, but they were fascinated by the memory of the absent Jews, which was constructed by Poles. They are distant from themselves, and they have a sense of irony as they observe the Polish reality around them. This Poland is different, democratic, and modern. The second-wave writers are not afraid to enter into a dialogue and interaction with Poles and they treat them as subjects, not as symbols of the “other”; but for first-wave writers, Poles were merely in the background, not partners for dialogue. However, in both waves the goal of the journey is to construct an identity by finding a link to the past that will establish a continuity: a continuity that offers the consolation of a complete story and therefore closure.

The Concept of Byrony

“The Concept of Byrony” examines Kierkegaard’s lyrical relation to Lord Byron. As an alternative to models of German influence, this paper discusses Kierkegaard’s quotations of Byron’s poetry and allusions to the poet himself. The paper establishes a poetical relationship between the two writers in terms of irony and metaphor. Kierkegaard’s sense of irony is creative but not unique; its roots can be located in earlier writings of the Danish Golden Age. Of particular importance is the development of irony in the works of Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the young writers that surrounded him, including the young Kierkegaard himself. It was in Heiberg’s salon where Byron seems to have first stepped into the Danish literary landscape. For Kierkegaard and Danish letters in general, the reception and celebrity-status of Byron perhaps play a more important role than his verse, although another acolyte of Heiberg’s, Frederik Paludan-Müller, wrote poetry that strongly illustrates Byron’s poetical influence in Danish verse. The paper also examines the Byronic notion of the empty sign, a metaphor that points to its own meaninglessness as a further poetic relationship. Moreover, the Byronic hero as a model for a lived life provided Kierkegaard with a powerful public mask that accompanied him to his last days. I term this mask and masquerade Byrony. In its conclusion the paper marks a significant similarity between the death-scenes and epitaphs of these major nineteenth-century European writers.