153 research outputs found
RECENZIJA KNJIGE Rafe McGregor, A CRIMINOLOGY OF NARRATIVE FICTION, Bristol University Press, 2021
Full text linkBOOK REVIEW: Rafe McGregor, A CRIMINOLOGY OF NARRATIVE FICTION, Bristol University Press, 2021, pp. 176, ISBN: 978-1529208054RECENZIJA KNJIGE: Rafe McGregor, A CRIMINOLOGY OF NARRATIVE FICTION, Bristol University Press, 2021, str. 176, ISBN: 978-152920805
Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism
No full textThere is increasing pressure on the humanities to justify their value and on criminology to undertake interdisciplinary research. In this book, Rafe McGregor establishes a new interdisciplinary methodology, ‘criminological criticism’, harnessing the synergy between literary studies and critical criminology to produce genuine interventions in social reality. McGregor practices criminological criticism on George Miller’s ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’, Prime Video’s ‘Carnival Row’ and J.K. Rowling’s ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, demonstrating how these popular allegories provide insights into the harms of sexism, racism and class prejudice. This book proposes a model for collaboration between literary studies and critical criminology that is beneficial to the humanities, the social sciences and society
The Value of Literature
No full textIn The Value of Literature, Rafe McGregor employs a unique approach – the combination of philosophical work on value theory and critical work on the relationship between form and content – to present a new argument for, and defence of, literary humanism. He argues that literature has value for art, for culture, and for humanity – in short, that it matters. Unlike most contemporary defenders of literary value, the author's strategy does not involve arguing that literature is good as a means to one of the various ends that matter to human beings. It is not that literature necessarily makes us cleverer, more sensitive, more virtuous, more creative, or just generally better people. Nor is it true that there is a necessary relation between literature and edification, clarification, cultural critique, catharsis, or therapy. Rather than offer an argument that forges a tenuous link between literature and truth, or literature and virtue, or literature and the sacred, this book analyses the non-derivative, sui generic value characteristic of literature and demonstrates why that matters as an end in itself
Narrative Justice
No full textThis book introduces narrative justice, a new theory of aesthetic education - the thesis that the cultivation of aesthetic or artistic sensibility can both improve moral character and achieve political justice. The author argues that there is a subcategory of narrative representations that provide moral knowledge regardless of their categorisation as fiction or non-fiction, and which therefore can be employed as a means of moral improvement. McGregor applies this narrative ethics to the criminology of inhumanity, including both crimes against humanity and terrorism. Expanding on the methodology of narrative criminology, he demonstrates that narrative representations can be employed to evaluate responsibility for inhumanity, to understand the psychology of inhumanity, and to instigate desistance from inhumanity - and are thus a means to the end of opposing injustice. He concludes that the cultivation of narrative sensibility is an important tool for both moral improvement and political justice
Literary Interventions in Justice
Full text linkIn his Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx made the famous injunction: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ This is a daunting task for most academics specialising in literature, especially in a time of declining literacy. The purpose of this symposium is to explore the ways in which literature, broadly construed to include poetry and narrative in a variety of modes of representation, can change the world by providing interventions in justice. Our approach foregrounds the relationship between the activity demanded by some individual literary works and some categories of literary work on the one hand and the way in which those works can make a tangible difference to social reality on the other. We consider three types of active literary engagement: doing philosophy, ideological critique, and necessary rather than contingent performance. Kate Kirkpatrick opens with Kamal Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013), reading the narrator as not only a critic of colonial and post-colonial discourse, but a literary exemplar of the search for justice when it is difficult to know to what level of explanation to attribute its absence. Rafe McGregor demonstrates how the final season of Prime Video’s The Man in the High Castle (2015-2019) makes a radical break from the previous three, exposing the misanthropy at the core of right-wing populism and calling for a fundamentally democratic response from the left. Finally, Karen Simecek argues that poetry in performance has a potentially reparative function for the ethically lonely – the vulnerable, the oppressed, and the persecuted – in society
The Break Line:Chaotic Murder in the 21st Century
Full text linkRafe McGregor & Ema Luna Lalić Abstract: The 21st century is rapidly emerging as an era of entropy, of multi-polar power struggles, of concurrent crises the causes of which are little understood, and of catastrophic vulnerability to phenomena such as climate change and artificial intelligence. This is the world into which war correspondent James Brabazon throws Major Max McLean, a UK Special Forces operator, in his 2018 novel, The Break Line. McLean is a hardened veteran of what criminologist Vincenzo Ruggiero (2019) calls the chaotic murder of war, but his mission takes an unexpected turn when Brabazon switches genre from action adventure to supernatural thriller at the narrative’s crisis. This article situates the novel in the philosophical approach to answering the question of moral impact of literature, as proposed by Richard Rorty (1978, 1989) and Iris Murdoch (1999, 2014). Rorty argues that literature expresses the perspective of the victims of cruelty, which is why it has a great importance for helping to eliminate cruelty and improve solidarity in society. Murdoch emphasises the value of individual moral development facilitated by literature’s potential to support ‘unselfing’, i.e. detachment from one’s own personal feelings or interests. In keeping with Rorty and Murdoch, we argue that The Break Line is an exemplary exercise in psychological and political sensemaking, staging the epistemic and ethical challenges of contemporary authoritarian lawlessness in terms of Jacques Lacan’s (1949, 1955, 1973) register theory, specifically the collapse of the Symbolic in the face of pressure from the Real and a retreat to the Imaginary.<br/
Synopsis:A Criminology of Narrative Fiction
Full text linkThe purpose of this article is to summarise A Criminology of Narrative Fiction (McGregor 2021), which is the subject of this special issue of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology. The monograph is a development and expansion of ‘Criminological Fiction: What is it good for?’ (McGregor 2020), which was published in the January 2020 issue of the journal. Although the axiology and research framework of the article and the monograph differ, their argument and conclusion are identical. My thesis is that some narrative fictions can provide at least one or more of the following types of criminological knowledge: phenomenological, counterfactual, and mimetic. A Criminology of Narrative Fiction employs the phenomenological, counterfactual, and mimetic values of fiction to establish a theory of the criminological value of narrative fiction
Synopsis:A Criminology of Narrative Fiction
Full text linkThe purpose of this article is to summarise A Criminology of Narrative Fiction (McGregor 2021), which is the subject of this special issue of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology. The monograph is a development and expansion of ‘Criminological Fiction: What is it good for?’ (McGregor 2020), which was published in the January 2020 issue of the journal. Although the axiology and research framework of the article and the monograph differ, their argument and conclusion are identical. My thesis is that some narrative fictions can provide at least one or more of the following types of criminological knowledge: phenomenological, counterfactual, and mimetic. A Criminology of Narrative Fiction employs the phenomenological, counterfactual, and mimetic values of fiction to establish a theory of the criminological value of narrative fiction
Analytic Aesthetics from Theory to Practice?:Reply to Vidmar Jovanović
Full text linkIris Vidmar Jovanović’s (2021) ‘Applied Ethical Criticism of Narrative Art’ has a goal the significance of which can hardly be overestimated, the development of an analytic aesthetic framework for a publicly relevant ethical criticism. She employs public relevance to delineate a critique that is confined to neither the value interaction debate (VID) nor the debate about aesthetic cognitivism (AC), both of which are unique to analytic aesthetics and have little impact beyond the discipline of philosophy, let alone beyond academia. In drawing attention to the relationship between applied ethical criticism on the one hand and the VID and AC on the other, Vidmar Jovanović levels a scathing indictment against the majority of philosophers of art, who are for the most part disinterested in the social and political implications of their theoretical research. In this brief reply, I begin by setting out the practical limitations of analytic aesthetics, endorsing and extending her critique. I then discuss Vidmar Jovanović’s criticism of my own contribution to AC (McGregor 2018). I conclude with her proposed framework, which makes an insightful and urgent appeal for an analytic aesthetics rooted in both interdisciplinary and phenomenological research
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