The Text as Context

Since the emergence of the modern criticism theories, the aim of these theories was the focus on research and the analysis of literary texts scientifically and academically and according to specific data. The historical criticism theory is one of the first modern criticism theories adopted by many of pioneers of literature and has a group of scientific constituents that investigate the relationship between the text and its external aspects. Generally, there are three stages of criticism theories: the first stage deals with the external aspects of the text .For example writer's life, social situation, conditions and historical events. These external aspects are tools for structuralists and formalists. The second stage deals with the internal context of the literary text. This stage appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century as constructional criticism, modern criticism and structuralism. The last stage pays attention to the readers' role as semiology criticism, deconstruction criticism, reception theory …..etc. This theory is connected to external aspects of the text and it takes historical, political and social events as a means to analyze the literary text. According to this theory, the literary text is reflection of writer's life conditions and the writer is a mirror for the social situations predominant during his era and education emerges from environment which is a part of the history. Therefore, the theory of historical criticism in the process of criticism emphasizes the writer's life, predominant conditions and the environment that the literary text is their outcome. The present study focuses on two collections of poems, namely "The songs and Snow and Fire " by Muaaed Taeeb and "I will not retreat " by Rekesh Amedy . The two collections were analyzed according to the three bases of historical criticism (Time, Environment, and Race). The aim of this study is the explanation of the historical dimension of two collections of poems namely "The songs and Snow and Fire " by Muaaed Taeeb and "I will not retreat " by Rekesh Amedy . As a result of the analysis conducted on these two collections, it turned out that the historical criticism was one of the essential pillars of the creation of the theme and ideology of those poems.

Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in Marcuse's critical theory. This can be partly ascribed to Marcuse's interdisciplinary approach to humanities and social sciences. Many of Marcuse's ideas and concepts are tacitly present in contemporary social and ecological movements. Contemporary literature on Marcuse is positively inclined to his theory while the critique of Marcuse dates back to the '70s, and remains largely unimpaired. This fact poses significant challenges to the revival of Marcuse's critical theory. This study sets out to report on current interest in Marcuse's critical theory trying to correct past injustices by responding to negative criticism. The main flaw of such criticism - as we see it - is in failing to perceive interdisciplinary character of Marcuse's critical theory. Marcuse's renaissance cannot be complete without, to use dialectical term, sublating the history of negative criticism.

94ARTHURIANA she has identified earlier, rather she is concerned to investigate the lexicon ofseveral unattributed texts to establish their probability of having been written by Andrea. While establishing a canon based on an author's usage is a valuable and traditional occupation, it does not quite fulfill the promises implied in the title. Once it is clear what the author actually means, however, her study of the 'language of chivalry' in the works ofAndrea da Barberino is an impressive and careful study of the author's works. Her use ofthe Guerrino as a test ofauthenticity is a bit problematic, however, since she acknowledges that authorities do not universally attribute this work to Andrea. Through her examinarion of the undisputed works attribured to Andrea, the six books of / Reali di Francia, the Aspramente, the Storie Nerbonese, La Storia de Aiolfo del Barbicene, La Storia de Ugone d'Avernia, and Guerrino il Meschino, she argues that Andrea should also be credited with La Prima Spagna, La Seconda Spagna (also known as the Ansuigi), and Le Storie de Rinaldo da Monte Albano; to even the balance, she concludes with arguments that he did not write // Libro di Rambaldo (predictably, perhaps, because the quality is inferior). Her arguments seem persuasive. La Prima and Seconda Spagna fill in the missing bits in the Charlemagne cycle begun in the Reali de Francia and picked up in the Storie Nerbonese. Her careful examination ofthe language of the texts is minute and includes an examination of figures as well. A particularly charming example is her use ofelephant similes to draw a relationship between the Guerrino and the Rinaldo. Allaire provides a scrupulous examination ofthe language ofthe texts that may be attributed to Andrea da Barberino. Her book is not easy reading (and does not discuss the larger issues of ethos and language that she raises in her first chapter and title), but is a valuable prolegomena to a critical edition of Andrea's works, especially of those unedited works she now claims for him. This consequent giant step seems to be the project Allaire has in mind and the current book reads like the introduction to a pending edition. Considering the scope ofsuch a project, it would be unrealistic to suggest she also embark on a translation ofAndrea into English. Now that she has established his corpus and demonstrated his importance to an English-speaking audience, she might now want to make him accessible. Ifshe herselfdoes not wish to take on this Herculean task, she has done the groundwork for a succeeding generation of scholars and Ph.D. candidates. DON HOFFMAN Northeastern Illinois University Catherine s. cox. Gender andLanguage in Chaucer. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Pp. 240. isbn: 0-8130-1519-7. $49.95. I recently listened to a colleague give a paper on Robert Frost at a departmental colloquium and was astonished at her intimate psychologizing of his intentions. It was a well-done ptesentation, certainly eloquent and well-reasoned—if one could accept her premises that, unfortunately, remained underexamined and unproblematized throughout her talk. I was amused that I, the lone medievalist among a host of REVIEWS95 Americanists, had the strongest reaction against the idea of author function and autonomy on display over the cheese and crackers. Like many medievalists traditionally trained but committed to contemporary litetary theory, I am perhaps more sensitive, if not actually neurotic, about how theory is or is not deployed by my peers. The afternoon demonstrated for me once again that all critical theories are equal, but some are more equal than others. First, poststructuralist theories have made it impossible to write about texts without writing about method and the problems of method; second, the recent turn to history (as we like to describe it) has made it impossible to write about texts without taking into consideration the history of criticism itself. Such developments have dictated a short shelf-life for certain kinds of approaches to texts. These are the thoughts that came to mind as I read GenderandLanguage in Chaucer, for Catherine Cox's readings of the Chaucerian oeuvre, finely calibrated as they are, represent a strain ofpoststructuralist French feminism which, while it may no longer require explanation...

Critical theory is an always-evolving school of thought concerned with critiquing and transforming society. Critical theory refers to the theories developed by the Frankfurt School and other recent social scientists and feminist theorists whose theories aim to explain and transform social circumstances that enslave human beings. Critical theory has been the main source of analysis in the field of curriculum studies, particularly critical curriculum theory. Critical theory has particularly influenced the work of critical curriculum theorists focused on curriculum for social reconstruction. It is important to note that, however, the critical tradition in curriculum studies in the U.S. can also be traced back to the work of Dewey, Counts, Rugg, Macdonald, Huebner, and Greene. The integration of critical theory into this critical tradition contributes to the formation of critical curriculum studies, which is well represented in the scholarship of Michael W. Apple, one of the world’s foremost educational and curriculum theorists. Apple’s emphasis on critical examination of the social realities on the one hand and search for possibilities to empower people and transform society on the other hand points to crucial tasks of critical educational and curriculum studies. Possibilities about using the process of schooling for social reconstruction and designing curriculum for a new cultural order depend on how thoroughly the current problems of social realities can be uncovered. The ideas of ideology, hegemony, official knowledge, power, deskilling, reskilling, and work intensification will be introduced to help readers understand how critical curriculum studies use these notions to examine key critical theory themes such as the politics of domination, legitimation, oppression, and exploitation embedded in school curriculum. Recent development of critical theories has presented various directions for critical curriculum scholarship. The discussion of critical theory within curriculum studies is a way to revive the tradition of loosely termed critical curriculum studies (Sadovnik 1991) while simultaneously providing a contextual framework to build a rich conceptual foundation for engaging in a disciplined critical curriculum analysis. As new forms of critical theory have been and will be developed, critical curriculum studies continue to be enriched by this school of thought. The task of critical curriculum theory must be to open up more spaces for collective work for both critical analysis and social transformation.

This New Casebook contains ten essays written about Blake's poetry since 1970 selected to show the diversity of Blake criticism during the last twenty years and the ways in which contemporary critical theories open up new readings of his work. Essays representative of Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, feminist and new historicist criticism are included. David Punter's Introduction places these in the context of recent developments in critical theory and shows how today's student can best engage with Blake's complex and rewarding work.

This article argues that two distinct concepts of Enlightenment coexist uneasily in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. According to the first, genealogical concept, Enlightenment is a bewildered form of self-preservation that has existed since the dawn of Western civilization. The second, critical historicist concept views Enlightenment as the critical and anti-authoritarian ideals articulated—most radically in eighteenth-century France—during the uneven development of modern bourgeois society. After examining the origins of these two concepts in Adorno and Horkheimer’s early writings, the article demonstrates why the former became dominant in Dialectic of Enlightenment, while at the same time pointing to significant traces of the latter that remained. The article contends that a reconsideration of the latter concept reveals of a model of early Critical Theory that can still provide a compelling alternative not only to Dialectic of Enlightenment, but also to more recent attempts to place Critical Theory on normative foundations.

A quick look on the history of criticism and literary theory of the current period shows curious reversals and strange returns. Indeed one can see the slow and unrelenting disappearance of rhetoric, justly qualified as restricted, since it has been all too often limited to identifying and classifying of the various figures. It has been replaced by a new criticism, a fundamentally formalist one, the assumptions of which are akin to those of the “text sciences”; if the structure, the “poetical function” of the texts were underlined, it was to the detriment of their functional reference and their meaning to put it simply. There is no doubt that today this approach is running out of steam and is meeting some decline. For that reason, the history of literature is coming back in force and finds a new youth with the developments of the theories of perception. But there reappears also a new interest in a semantic approach of the texts, which is concerned with their references. This approach, which comes from logistics (G. Frege), undoubtedly opens a philosophical horizon, particularly on some kind of ontology. Thus it is not surprising to find that a great many studies question the metaphorical process again from that perspective given the paradoxical nature of its reference and thus of its ontology which could be summed up through the usual exordium of the Majorcan storytellers: “Aixo era y no era” (it was and was not). Paul Ricœur insists on the paradoxical nature of the metaphorical reference since “the metaphor is a way of working on the language which consists in giving the logical subjects predicates that are incompatible with the first ones” (From Text to Action). In his book The Living Metaphor, the French philosopher analyses the concept of the “ontological metaphor” from the idea of the “divided reference”. Ricœur moves away from a purely stylistic or linguistic approach, centred on the word (a deviant denomination) to describe the metaphorical process on the level of the phrase and of the discourse (a non-pertinent predication): “Then there is a metaphor, since we can discern <…> the resistance of words <…> their incompatibility on the level of a literal interpretation of a sentence” (From Text to Action). But that non-pertinence and the abolition of the reference in the everyday reality are not a purely gratuitous verbal game, for they liberate “another kind of reference to other dimensions of reality” (The Living Metaphor). It is that way of tension of the metaphor which we intend to present in our study for it expresses some kind of „ontological vehemence” as Ricœur puts it so well? Let us add that the metaphor seen as a new description of reality, can be conceived, so to speak, as a “model”, in the sense of a prototype which accounts of the way a literary text functions when it is a “opening on the world”, when it places itself “in the service of things that want to be expressed” and when it responds “to the need of a discourse that comes from all forms of experience” (Mimesis, Reference and new figuration in “Time and Narrative”).

About the Contributors

AbstrakPenelitian ini mengkaji teori kritis komunikasi sebagai pendekatan analitis yang berfungsi untuk mengkritisi struktur kekuasaan, ideologi, dan relasi sosial dalam praktik komunikasi. Tujuan utama penelitian ini adalah untuk mengungkap dinamika kekuasaan dominan, menganalisis representasi dan konstruksi realitas, serta mendorong kesadaran kritis dan transformasi sosial melalui komunikasi. Penelitian ini menggunakan desain penelitian kualitatif dengan metode studi pustaka (library research), yang mengandalkan analisis kritis terhadap literatur, buku, jurnal akademik, dan konten media yang relevan. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa teori kritis komunikasi berakar pada pemikiran Marxis, kritik budaya, poststrukturalis, dan perspektif feminis. Dalam kajian komunikasi, teori ini diterapkan untuk menganalisis konten media, iklan, propaganda, komunikasi politik, dan wacana antarbudaya. Temuan penelitian ini menegaskan bahwa teori kritis komunikasi memiliki peran penting dalam meningkatkan kesadaran kritis, mendekonstruksi ideologi dominan, dan mendukung perubahan sosial. Simpulan penelitian ini menegaskan relevansi teori kritis sebagai kerangka berpikir untuk melakukan perlawanan terhadap hegemoni dalam praktik komunikasi. Implikasi dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa teori kritis komunikasi dapat digunakan sebagai alat strategis bagi pendidik, praktisi media, dan akademisi komunikasi untuk mendorong komunikasi yang emansipatoris dan mempromosikan keadilan sosial dalam kehidupan masyarakat kontemporer. Kata Kunci: Teori Kritis; Komunikasi; Kekuasaan Dominan; Kesadaran Kritis; Perubahan Sosial. Abstract This study examines critical communication theory as an analytical approach that critiques power structures, ideologies, and social relations within communication practices. The main objective of this research is to uncover the dynamics of dominant power, analyze the representation and construction of reality, and promote critical awareness and social transformation through communication. This study adopts a qualitative research design using library research (studi pustaka) as the primary method, relying on the critical analysis of literature, books, academic journals, and relevant media content. The research results show that critical communication theory is rooted in Marxist thought, cultural criticism, poststructuralism, and feminist perspectives. In communication studies, this theory is applied to analyze media content, advertising, propaganda, political communication, and intercultural discourse. The findings emphasize that critical communication theory plays a significant role in enhancing critical consciousness, deconstructing dominant ideologies, and supporting social change. The conclusion highlights the relevance of critical theory in providing a framework for resistance against hegemony in communication practices. The implication of this study suggests that critical communication theory can be used as a strategic tool for educators, media practitioners, and communication scholars to foster emancipatory communication and promote social justice in contemporary society. Keywords: Critical Theory; Communication; Dominant Power; Critical Consciousness; Social Change.

Puisqu'il n'existe pas de mots qui ne soient à personne(Bakhtin 1979 in Todorov 1981: 83)Le discours, c'est-à-dire le langage dans sa totalité concrète et vivante.(Bakhtin 1963 in Todorov 1981: 44)European travel accounts are widely used as sources to write the history of societies that did not themselves produce a large amount of textual documentation. On the Coast of Guinea, and more particularly on the area formerly known as Gold Coast (approximately the littoral of modern Ghana), many of the written documents providing historians with information on coastal societies prior to nineteenth century were produced by Europeans travelers. Most of these individuals were merchants, craftsmen, pastors or soldiers who had settled several years in the numerous forts and trading posts erected along the seashore to protect and enhance the trade of chartered companies. Others were seamen and merchants who only spent a few weeks at a stretch plying the African Coast aboard men-of-war or trading ships, exchanging manufactured goods for gold, slaves, and ivory. Professional writers, who had not traveled to Africa, but had obtained data from various written sources or from travelers, also composed some of the accounts. Therefore, these documents show an extraordinary diversity in form and content, which historians and archeologists need to investigate before using them as primary sources for reconstructing the past.In the first part of the present paper, which focuses on a specific genre, the seventeenth-century travel accounts, I recall the historiography of the recent critique of these sources. I also point out that despite decisive methodological breakthroughs, some heuristic dimensions or attributes of these texts are yet to be recognized and assessed. I then re-examine these sources from the dual perspective of historic and linguistic anthropological methods and introduce an exploratory approach centered on the Bakhtinian approach to discourse.

Reviewed by: After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France by Tom Perchard Maristella Feustle After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France. By Tom Perchard. (Jazz Perspectives.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. [viii, 297 p. ISBN 9780472072422 (hardcover), $80; ISBN 9780472052424 (paperback), $39.95; ISBN 9780472120758 (e-book), $39.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, index. After Django offers a much-needed English-language study of an area that historical (American) narratives on jazz generally only treat in passing. The second half of the title is a more accurate indicator of the book’s subject; aside from brief attention in the third chapter, Django Reinhardt’s career primarily figures as a point of reference for a general time period, with no particular emphasis on the genre of jazz that arose from his work. Perchard effectively articulates the gap in scholarship that this book is intended to bridge, but the narrative is uneven, juxtaposing straightforward, [End Page 104] easily-readable sections with complex passages and run-on sentences that require two or three rereadings to make sense of them. Continuity is sometimes lacking between chapters: one chapter can feel as if it were in a different book from another. Perchard tends to build to a conclusion, laying out several threads and pulling them together rather than stating an argument and supporting it—a rhetorical approach that may lend itself more to a talk given in person than to the printed page. The consistent use of contractions (especially “it’s”), dangling participles, and colloquialisms (“churchly,” “composerly”) also gives a feeling of spoken discourse, but the alternation between written and spoken conventions interrupts the flow of the text at times. Perchard’s command of relevant literature is laudable, though readers without some background in critical theory and Marxism may find the extensive discourses based on them bewildering; those matters are presented with the assumption that the reader is conversant with them. The text is organized into four major subject areas: Hugues Panassié and the history of jazz criticism in France; André Hodeir and Thelonious Monk; Miles Davis and French film music that employed jazz; and saxophonist Barney Wilen, with two chapters of summation and discussion at the end. One deliberate omission with which readers may take issue is Perchard’s decision not to address women in jazz in France, except for glossing over the subject in the introduction with statements such as “women players were kept back by the macho culture of jazz performance” (p. 15). One might argue that his stated scope of discussion duplicates the prejudices of prior eras, implying simply that no women measured up to being “identified and celebrated as leaders of the various French jazz schools” (p. 16). While the desire to provide thorough background information is admirable, the book feels as though it begins in the third chapter, with the first given to preliminaries, and the second devoted to a lengthy and problematic discussion of Hugues Panassié. One of the text’s observations is, indeed, that absolute objectivity is humanly impossible; however, Perchard’s own bias is, in places, scarcely nuanced. One such moment arrives in his characterization of the basis for Panassié’s worldview as “right-wing Catholicism.” This reviewer (a Catholic) must ask: What, precisely, constituted the “right wing” of the global Catholic Church in the early twentieth century? Or did Perchard mean instead that a self-identifying Catholic such as Panassié had views that were informed by contemporary political currents in Europe? So much rests on the characterization of Panassié as “right wing”—not a monolithic term, but relative to time, place, and ideology—that it bears more detailed definition than a nebulous sense of general conservatism. The “Catholic” influences Perchard cites as the reasons for the spiritual component to Panassié’s embarrassing, primitivist views were quite local, and quite French (Léon Bloy, Jacques Maritain, Charles Pegúy), along with the decidedly un-Catholic René Guénon. Meanwhile, the papacy of Pius XI saw the issuance of the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, which repudiated the racism and nationalist elitism (that was often laced with metaphysical undertones) on the European continent at that time—most notoriously, but not only, in Nazi Germany. The...

Politics of History: Narrativity, Ideology, and Walter Benjamin's Critique of Progress

Conrad’s implicit encouragement of the reader to’ see’ with him, evoked in the previous chapter, testifies to his conception of reading and writing as acts of solidarity. This intersubjective inclination reflects Conrad’s promotion of a participative poetics that tends to a shared vision and reciprocal understanding with his audience.1 Conrad’s participative poetics is the focus of the present chapter. It is examined within a broad literary and cultural context that should allow us to grasp its complexity and ramifications. The approach is comparative and consists in studying Conrad’s technical experimentation, reader-response theory, sense of the dramatic, and narrative self-consciousness through the lens of the works of three major eighteenth-century writers: Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot. My contention is that these authors’ literary and reader theories widely influenced Conrad’s poetics, although Conrad nowhere acknowledged a debt to them. And since writing is essentially an act of appropriation and adaptation,2 Conrad’s eighteenth-century influences were, unsurprisingly, themselves indebted to earlier literary traditions. They drew on ancient Greek and Roman poets as well as on Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift. They assimilated the epic and dramatic forms they borrowed and ushered their narrative forms in new directions.3

Futurist Alvin Toffler and critical theorist and historian Michel Foucault both referenced the interface of consumption and production – 'prosumption' – around 1980 in considerably different ways. Whereas Toffler focused on the empirical basis of prosumption at a time of structural unemployment and customised demand, Foucault's rendition was discursive and focused on the subjective dimension of prosumption under neoliberal governance. This article engages both contextual and subjective dimensions of prosumption in the context of digital life in the new millennium. Literature to date has emphasised prosumption from the vantage point of digital consumers, whose daily internet activity produces profit for firms while consumers receive no compensation for the data they produce and thereby are dispossessed of the fruits of their free labour – a perverse dimension of prosumption in the digital era. I extend the notion of dispossessed prosumption from the realm of digital consumers to digital producers – those who seek a wage through digital means – to permit an overarching conceptualisation of the digital regime of work, recognising important similarities and differences in the processes by which digital subjects experience dispossessed prosumption. I argue that for-profit crowdsourcing is the salient corporate strategy in the digital era regarding capital-labour relations, encompassing both digital consumers and producers, although it is covert regarding the former and overt regarding the latter. I explain how dispossessed prosumption uniquely configures for digital producers with reference to the requirement for self-capitalisation in a context of deepened precarity, while producers' aspirations for a stable career and consumer lifestyle sustain the process. Although the processes by which digital producers and consumers are dispossessed differ relative to digital value chains, both digital consumers and producers nonetheless share vulnerability to digital addiction. Crucially, despite different strategies of resistance to date between digital consumers and producers, all resistance strategies are rooted in common sensibilities, which potentially can be weaponised towards transcending the dated consumption/production divide to realise an effective coalitional movement.

This paper examines the literary criticism of China about F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot” (1868), which has been the focus of attention of various readership, as well as the issues of perception and study of the novel in modern Chinese theory of literary criticism. Hence, the purpose of this article is to trace the history of literary criticism of the “The Idiot” in China over the past almost ninety years since its first publication in Chinese in 1935. It is noted that during this period the novel was translated into Chinese at least seventeen times with millions of copies released, withstanding more than 50 editions. It also provides an overview of the studies of Chinese scientists in recent years devoted to the study of the novel, and attempts are made to identify trends in the study and commentary of the novel in China. Chinese readers were first introduced to Dostoevsky’s work by the famous novelist, literary critic and translator Zhou Zuozhen. The conducted research allows us to conclude that Chinese readers accept and interpret F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot” with great interest. The questions that the researchers raise in their writings confirm the hypothesis that the Chinese reader associates the main character Prince Myshkin with the Confucian category of Ren.