The term “community” has a paradoxical presence in our everyday discourse. While many people lament not being part of a “real community,” they nonetheless use the word repeatedly to refer to groups. ...The problem became clearer to me after reading Hervé Varenne’s study of Appleton, Wisconsin, titledAmericans Together(1977). This French scholar began his sociological analysis by regretfully reporting that he was not able to find a “real community” in Appleton—but then went on to describe the sociological groups that he studied as “communities” anyway. Clearly the word “community” carries both normative and descriptive weight. Curiously, the ideals
When Benedict Anderson argued that the nation is “an imagined political community,” his phrase seemed so apt, even obvious, that it made its way into many facets of analysis in the human sciences. It ...also meshed with the current elevation of imagination as the most interesting, most effective, mental power we humans have—Captain Janeway must make a remarkable leap to find any continuity between her self-enclosed mental landscape and the collective intelligence of the Borg.¹ More particularly, the idea of imagined communities forged an important link between political and literary theories, since the mutual effects of imaginative constructs and
Walter Abell, professor of art at Acadia University and founder of the Maritime Art Association, spoke at the Conference of Canadian Artists in Kingston, Ontario, in June 1941. He saw the Kingston ...Conference — a forum for professional artists from across Canada to discuss technical aspects of painting and artists’ position in society — as a “spiritual milestone ... perhaps ... a spiritual mountain top,” even a victory for “cultural democracy.” He later wrote inMaritime Artthat at this first national gathering of artists in Canada “something in the atmosphere of the group seemed to lift it above sectionalism and divisionism
EPILOGUE Zwicker, Jonathan
Practices of the Sentimental Imagination,
07/2006, Letnik:
277
Book Chapter
“It would be absurd to claim that the literature of a country is capable of producing aBetrothedor aSepolcrionce a year or even once every ten years,” Gramsci writes in hisPrison Notebooks:
That is ...why normal critical activity … cannot but be a criticism of ‘trends’ if it is not to become a continuous massacre…. A consistently negative criticism, based on slashing evaluations and demonstrations of “non-poetry” rather than “poetry,” would become tedious and revolting. The choice would look like a man-hunt…. It seems clear that criticism must always have a positive function, in the sense
CONCLUSION Lorman A. Ratner; Dwight L. Teeter
Fanatics and Fire-Eaters,
01/2003
Book Chapter
From the moment of independence, Americans faced the daunting task of creating what Benedict Anderson has called “an imagined community.” ¹ Could people with different religious beliefs and who came ...from different ethnic backgrounds, were divided by class differences, and lived in communities far apart both in time and space be able to find some common identity? Lacking the bonds that one religion, one heritage, or at least the familiarity that came with social interaction that might be formed, Americans found communal bonds in ideas, images, myths, and symbols that reflected a shared belief and agreed upon values in what
This chapter examines the Loch Ness monster movie, an incarnation of the monster genre completely ignored in academic discussions of Scotland and cinema. It begins with a brief examination of the ...history of Nessie, including the media coverage that accompanied the monster’s first reported sightings in the twentieth century, its relationship with tourism and the ways in which the early British Nessie movie The Secret of the Loch (1934) used the monster to examine the relationship between England and Scotland. This theme is pursued throughout the rest of the chapter, for the majority of which I focus on Loch Ness
In many ways Margaret Fuller was an eccentric among her peers, a puzzle who mystified her contemporaries and who continues to elude her critics. Fuller herself questioned her identity in an 1831 ...diary entry that recalls a childhood moment of perplexity: “How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?” (Von Mehren 6). Henry James framed her as an enigma when he reportedly inquired, “Would she, with her appetite for ideas and her genius for conversation, have struck us but as a formidable bore, one of the worst
Considers how battles at the margins of US society have crucially shaped definitions of what it is to be American, drawing on several historical anecdotes. For most of its history, the US identity ...has been defined by a mix of civic & ethnic definitions. As the definition of US citizenship expanded in the 19th century, the deteriorating condition of blacks became its symbiotic condition. Reconstruction witnessed a symbolic revolution in the definition of US citizenship because it explicitly included blacks in that circle. However, by the Progressive period, when the substance of citizenship was expanding, its boundaries were being narrowed by economic realities. It was during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt period that US citizenship came to be defined broadly by civic criteria. However, the widespread acceptance of civic nationalism in the post-WWII period now may be vulnerable to new manifestations of scientific racism & overt hostility to nonwhite immigrants. D. Ryfe
Treason always implies the violation of an “Us” and its principles. In Israel, the use of the word traitor in public debate has gradually changed since the founding of the state in 1948. The ...terminological change has been accompanied by the modification and diminishing of the betrayed “Us”, the Israeli “Us”, and more people are excluded. In 2019, with the outbreak of a substantial crisis within Israeli politics, the Israeli “Us” was also in crisis as it was no longer possible to establish who was part of the whole and especially what the whole consisted of. This article seeks to examine the crisis of the Israeli “Us”, the Israeli imagined community, by closely exploring the way in which the word traitor has been used in public debate, from the foundation of the State of Israel to the present day, and consequently the definition of the “Us”.
InRevolution in Poetic LanguageJulia Kristeva psychoanalytically understands the myth of Orpheus to be indicative of the perilous journey of the poet in danger of losing his or her subjectivity in ...the process of writing.² While Kristeva’s approach may offer a beginning to reading poetic practice, I will use an additional ally in my underworld journey of critique. Not entrenched in the psychoanalytic paradigm, Benedict Anderson’s influentialImagined Communitiesexamines how writing, in the form of print, newspapers, and novels, produces an imaginary, a set of fictional mechanisms by which community can be imagined.³ Curiously, he focuses on prose
