Pluralist Universalism is an original and daring book that prompts us to re-think the politics of difference within and across national boundaries. Literary scholar Wen Jin has developed an innovative approach to the study of multicultural narratives that emerge from two distinct and yet intertwined national contexts – namely, China and United States after the […]
Tore Rye Andersen (reviewing Stephen Burn’s Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism) is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, Department of Contemporary Literature at Aarhus University (Denmark), and chief editor of the Danish literary journal Passage. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the work of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan […]
For Christopher Hitchens—the Left at War with Himself What follows are nine essays inspired by Michael Berube’s book of 2009, The Left at War (NYU Press), prefaced by Nick Cohen’s shot at dealing in brief with some of the same issues, which he takes on at greater length in his book of 2007, What’s Left? […]
On Intellectual Biography Tim Kaposy When we have to change an opinion about anyone, we charge heavily to their account the inconvenience they thereby cause us. -Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil” In lieu of amplifying that denunciation of biography some of us hear regularly–that history’s venerated figures tend to be its unacknowledged criminals–this issue […]
1. Introduction Almost twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is not too far-fetched to argue that Eastern European women have carried the burden of the post-communist transition. The transformative paradigm shift caused by the collapse of communism left the political and social positions of women in shambles. And while the Soviet […]
Censorship used to be quite a predictable research subject. It was often associated with ideas about State oppression, intolerant governments or other powerful institutions controlling the minds of powerless citizens and society’s dominated classes. Censorship was related to dictators and their brutal strategies to limit freedom of speech, or to undermine artistic expression. It was […]
1. Political discourse in context In the age of mediatized mass democracies, political discourse in the media is an important means for ordinary people to encounter politics (Lauerbach & Fetzer, 2007). This is particularly true of political debates and interviews, in which political information is transmitted in dialogue-anchored forms. Against this background, different discourse genres, […]
To a western ear there is presumably nothing ambiguous about the term post-communism. It seems to be merely descriptive, referring to the realities of countries which only 20 years ago lived under the political and socio-economical system known as ‘real socialism’. In the last decades, those countries are believed to have been undergoing the process […]
1. Introduction In a city like Brussels, where different communities live together and interact, participatory media practices can play an important role in the construction of a democratic and communicative urban network. Analyzing one of these participatory urban media organizations – the digital storytelling organization BBOT-BNA (a combination of abbreviations of the Dutch[1] ‘Brussel Behoort […]
In this fourth issue of Politics and Culture (2008) we have explicitly chosen for a European perspective. An editorial team of 6, consisting of 3 Belgians (Joke Bauwens, Nico Carpentier & Sofie Van Bauwel), 2 Germans (Tanja Thomas & Fabian Virchow) and one Hungarian (Peter Csigo) launched a call for essays and reviews, for instance […]