FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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Subgenres as a sign of socio-cultural change: the case of men\u27s magazines\u27 problem pages in the UK
Get PDF\u27Culture\u27 is often said to be "one of the two or three most complex words in the English language" (Eagleton 1). Leaving aside any differentiation between \u27high\u27 and \u27popular culture\u27, this notion is herein taken from a contemporary cultural studies perspective integrating traditional anthropological approaches to the concept with a more recent sociological emphasis. As cultural theorist Stuart Hall stresses, "the word \u27culture\u27 is used to refer to whatever is distinctive about the \u27way of life\u27 of a people, community, nation or social group. [...] Alternatively, the word can be used to describe the \u27shared values\u27 of a group or of society" (2). The cultural is often conceived of as part of the social. For "the community\u27s culture influences its social structure and vice versa; indeed both are intertwined and have been separated only for purposes of analysis" (Griswold 11).Focusing on men\u27s lifestyle magazines as a cultural artefact in contemporary British society, this paper explores how the emergence of problem pages as a subgenre in these publications may be explained as a sign of socio-cultural change in the UK. In particular, this contribution delves into the constitution of this subgenre, and new subject positions (e.g. \u27newmannism\u27 and \u27laddishness\u27) therein articulated, within a context of masculinity crisis. As Beynon puts it, "contemporary masculinity is held to be in crisis because the central tenets upon which previous masculinity was based (patriarchy, bread-winning, tasks demanding strength) have been eroded" (159). So, after making some notes on problem pages and men\u27s magazines in Britain, a number of extracts from problem pages in such magazines are examined. The notions of \u27genre\u27 and \u27discourse\u27 are subsequently theorized, and critical discourse analysis (henceforth CDA) is presented as an analytical resource for examining the interplay between discourse, society and culture. The status of British men\u27s magazines\u27 problem pages as a subgenre of its own is finally demonstrated, its evolution being finally accounted for from a CDA perspective
William Blake and the Bible: Reading and Writing the Law
Get PDFSamuel Beckett notes an etymological connection between the origin of the word law and the act of reading in the evolution of the Latin word lex (Beckett 11). The word lex originally meant a crop of acorns and its correlative verb legere meant to gather (acorns). Gradually, lex came to mean a gathering of peoples into an assembly - a political or legal assembly - and hence law; and the verblegere came to mean a gathering of letters into a word, to read. In the light of the notion that the Bible promotes unbounded reading, it is necessary to consider to what extent the activity of reading and interpretation is bound by law and convention
The Grotesque Sublime: Play with Terror
Get PDFThroughout "La Préface de Cromwell" (1827), Victor Hugo treats the sublime and the grotesque as different realms without seriously expounding upon their distinction. In examining the major treatises of the sublime, however, one will find that the grotesque actually resides inside the sublime in terms of evoking violent emotions, especially terror. This essay, then, aims to bring into relief the essential similarities between the grotesque and the sublime, thereby drawing attention to the role of the grotesque in the construction of artistic or aesthetic modernity
Sensationalism and Supersensibility: Eighteenth-Century Literary Terror Divided
Get PDFSchiller and Lewis present a polarity dividing Coleridge’s judgement of literary terror: Schiller, the unparalled artist of sublime terror, and Lewis, the most objectionable of gothic writers. Although Coleridge’s responses are in many ways linked to his own unique concerns, they also reflect the divided status of terror in the wider culture of the time. And if we want to understand this divided status, it is useful to turn to a characteristically Coleridgean question: is sensation transcended? This question has two distinct but related components: firstly, is the literary work addressed to higher faculties rather than the senses, and secondly, does the literary work itself depict a world with a supersensible realm
Screaming through the century: The female voice as cathartic/transformative force, from Berg\u27s Lulu to Tykwer\u27s Run Lola Run
Get PDFAlban Berg\u27s opera Lulu, dating from the early part of the twentieth century, and Tom Tykwer\u27s film from the end of the century, Lola rennt, (known to English-speaking audiences as Run Lola Run), have one striking feature in common: both culminate in an ear-splitting scream. At first glance, these two works appear poles apart in time, genre and cultural context, although both are Teutonic in origin. Berg\u27s "high-art" opera, based on the serial techniques of the Schoenberg school of composition, derives from Frank Wedekind\u27s fin-de-siècle Lulu plays, Earth Spirit and Pandora\u27s Box. By contrast, Tykwer\u27s film is an end-of-millennium "art-house" film that, on its release, quickly became a cult movie in Germany and beyond; fast-paced, visually and technically innovative, and backed by a driving techno soundtrack, its resonances with many aspects of video games and hypermedia position it as a text that heralds the twenty-first century. This article will explore how the screams (marking points of transformation at the denouement of each of these early and late twentieth-century works) are very different
Jonathan Lethem\u27s Genre Evolutions
Get PDFThe ideas I expound here proceed from an initial, rather broad observation that all of Jonathan Lethem\u27s novels subvert established fictional genres in some way. For example, The Fortress of Solitudedisrupts a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative with elements of fantasy and comic book super-heroics. As She Climbed Across the Table is billed as a "campus comedy," yet allows science fiction to infiltrate its witty satire on academic life. Girl in Landscape is a western set in space. Now, it can of course be argued that any genre is necessarily an unstable category, a somewhat volatile mixture of repeated, conventional elements and the variations that provide an individual text with a sense of identity. Scholars such as Margaret Cohen, in "Traveling Genre," have argued just this, and I take it as axiomatic throughout
Pull My Daisy. A Bebop Revolution
Get PDFOn the 12th May 1959 Pull My Daisy, a film written and narrated by Jack Kerouac and directed by Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank, was first projected at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Even though the film was enthusiastically acclaimed by critics like Jonas Mekas as one of the most accomplished productions of the New Cinema Group, as a "free improvisation" (Mekas, "New York Letter" 19) and as a fresh, lively sketch of Beat life, nonetheless some scholars criticized the production. What the adverse reviewers did not realize, however, is that the kind of truthfulness intended by both the directors of Pull My Daisy and by Kerouac himself was utterly different from the one which distinguishes the journalistic approach, the naked camera lenses that record the events of an ordinary moment just as they happen. This essay will explore the improvised techniques and \u27bebop poetics\u27 in Pull My Daisy What the adverse reviewers did not realize, however, is that the kind of truthfulness intended by both the directors of Pull My Daisy as a free improvisation stemming from a steady basis of pre-arranged themes, plots and filmic structures
I Wrote Eugene Onegin: Voices of Subversion and Submission in Soviet Anecdotes
Get PDFWhat is the difference between capitalism and communism? Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the other way round.This was a question aired on the Armenian Radio, a station renowned for offering freedom of speech in Soviet Russia, which notoriously voiced the officially forbidden yet widely accepted truths of Soviet existence. The Armenian Radio was created only discursively, in the vast body of quips and anecdotes that are a marked feature of popular Soviet discourse: regardless of the political observation or clarity, the above quotation is merely a joke. In this article, it is my intention to use these anecdotes as a means of exploring the power relationship at the centre of the soviet regime, to see these voices as part of what Foucault calls a "popular" or "disqualified knowledge," and to explore what the very process of joke telling reveals about the nature of struggle and resistance, under Foucault\u27s premise of "using resistances as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations" ("Subject and Power" 211).
Happiness Filled the Space of Sadness: the Weight, Tragedy and Paradox of Milan Kundera\u27s Freedom
Get PDFMilan Kundera\u27s choice to open his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) with two short chapters discussing Friedrich Nietzsche\u27s idea of eternal recurrence is, if nothing else, unconventional. It foregrounds his engagement with Nietzsche and suggests that the novel itself is something of a thought experiment, a working out of how such an abstract but compelling idea can have meaning in the world. The myth of eternal return poses, as Kundera\u27s narrator implies, an ultimate question of existence: will we choose that our lives, and therefore our actions, have weight or lightness? Or, as Nietzsche says in The Gay Science (1882), "If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again\u27 would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight!" (194). In other words, will this thought enslave an individual or will it empower them? Is there a paradoxical, controlling freedom an individual may obtain by embracing the vicissitudes of life, in willing that a chance event and its consequences might recur again and again