621 research outputs found

    The Texture of Everyday Life: Carceral Realism and Abolitionist Speculation

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    Exploring the ways in which prisons shape the subjectivity of free-world thinkers, and the ways that subjectivity is expressed in literary texts, this dissertation develops the concept of carceral realism: a cognitive and literary mode that represents prisons and police as the only possible response to social disorder. As this dissertation illustrates, this form of consciousness is experienced as racial paranoia, and it is expressed literary texts, which reflect and help to reify it. Through this process of cultural reification, carceral realism increasingly insists on itself as the only possible mode of thinking. As I argue, however, carceral realism actually stands in a dialectical relationship to abolitionist speculation, or, the active imagining of a world without prisons and police and/or the conditions necessary to actualize such a world. In much the same way that carceral realism embeds itself in realist literary forms, abolitionist speculation plays a constitutive role in the utopian literary tradition. In order to elaborate these concepts, this dissertation begins with a meta-consideration of how cultural productions by incarcerated people are typically framed. Building upon the work of scholars and incarcerated authors’ own interventions in questions of consciousness, authorship, textual production, and study, this chapter contrasts that typical frame with a method of abolitionist reading. Chapter two applies this methodology to Edward Bunker’s 1977 novel The Animal Factory and Claudia Rankine’s 2010 poem Citizen in order to develop the concept of carceral realism and demonstrate how it has developed from the 1970s to the present. In order to lay out the historical foundations of the modern prison, chapter three looks back to the late 18th century and situates the emergence of the penitentiary within debates regarding race, citizenship, and state power. Returning to the 1970s, chapter four investigates the role universities have played in the formation of carceral realism and the complex relationship Chicanos and Asian Americans have to prisons and police by analogizing the institutionalization of prison literary study to the formation of ethnic studies. Chapter five draws this project to a conclusion by developing the concept of abolitionist speculation, or the active imagining of a world without prisons or the police and/or the conditions necessary to realize such a world, which I identify as both a constitutive generic feature of utopian literature and something that exceeds literature altogether. In doing so, this dissertation establishes an ongoing historical relationship between social reproduction of prisons and literary forms that cuts across time, geography, race, gender, and genre

    Expert Ignorance:The Law and Politics of Rule of Law Reform

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    Foreword to Routledge Handbook of Global Land and Resource Grabbing

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    LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volum

    The Mediatization of the O.J. Simpson Case: From Reality Television to Filmic Adaptation

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    F. Scott Fitzgerald once said: "Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy." In the 1990s, nobody fell deeper than O.J. Simpson. Once considered a national treasure, the athlete was accused of brutally slaying his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman on June 12, 1994. Within days, the media and public developed an unprecedented obsession with the story, turning a murder investigation and trial into a sensationalized reality show. The author examines the mediatization, deliberate manipulation, and the simplification of popular criminal trials for profit on television. She demonstrates that TV conflated legal proceedings into entertainment programming by commodifying events, people, and places

    Multiple Sacralities: Rethinking Sacralizations in European History. Ein Europa der Differenzen, Band 3

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    We live in a present of multiple and conflicting sacralities. How do we account for the persistence and remarkable adaptability of traditional forms of the Christian sacred? How do we explain the ongoing allure of instrumentalizing the sacred for political purposes? And what do we make of the spread of nature spiritualities that have been so pertinent over the last half century? This volume seeks to reflect upon how these multiple sacralizations can be studied and understood in historical and cross-disciplinary perspective

    Music as Dialogic Sounding Device in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon

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    Combining key aspects of literary, musical, and cultural theory, my thesis investigates the significance of music in the work of the contemporary American novelist Thomas Pynchon. His novels, along with a handful of short stories, are so saturated with musical references and fictional songs that it borders on eccentricity. It is my argument that understanding musical presence and the way it is represented here is of crucial importance to our understanding one of the overarching themes of Pynchon’s writing: that of communication, and specifically the persistence of communication from the margins of society in the face of restricting and divisive political forces. My aim is to establish a positive view of Pynchon’s representation of music as a site of social intercourse, in the literal sense – a shared territory between language and artistic expression, through which both listener and performer are placed in a socially communicative framework; but also metaphorically, as a model for dialogic interaction that can undercut official discourse. As with all things in Pynchon, hope is tempered with a degree of cynicism: his depiction of musical media, for example, is varied and complex, and can be seen as a commentary on issues such as authenticity, the commodification of art, and corporate co-optation of subcultural expression. Nonetheless, the ubiquity of music in Pynchon is such that the attempt to communicate is persistently foregrounded. Chapter one establishes the techniques by which Pynchon incorporates the subject of music into his writing, before setting the significance of the author’s enterprise against the light of critical debates concerning the social efficacy and political energy of musical expression. The subsequent four chapters offer an in-depth look at Pynchon’s engagement with music in the light of themes that feed into the broader, overarching compulsion signalled above

    Trademarks and Textual Data: A Broader Perspective on Innovation = Marques et donnĂ©es textuelles : Une perspective Ă©largie sur l’innovation

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    Patente messen hĂ€ufig technische Innovationen, wĂ€hrend Handelsmarken Low-Tech und Dienstleistungen abdecken. In dieser Arbeit werden Textdaten von Marken untersucht, um verschiedene Rechte des geistigen Eigentums zu kombinieren. Textdaten ermöglichen zum Beispiel die Analyse großer Datenmengen, die Kombination verschiedener Quellen und datengestĂŒtzte Erkenntnisse. Die Kombination von Handelsmarken und Patenten in den Bereichen Robotik (Hightech) und Schuhe (Lowtech) bietet eine breitere Abdeckung und Details zu Innovationen, die je nach Sektor variieren. Im Musikinstrumentensektor verdeutlichen Textdaten zu Marken, Patenten und Designs den laufenden technologischen Wandel. Patente beziehen sich auf Daten und Digitalisierungsthemen und werden von High-Tech-Firmen genutzt, wĂ€hrend Handelsmarken die Signalverarbeitung und Videospiele von Spielfirmen abdecken. Designs fungieren als verbindendes Element. Eine Differenzierung zwischen Unternehmen und TĂ€tigkeitsbereichen ist möglich. Zusammenfassend zeigt die These, dass die Integration von textuellen Markendaten die Innovationsabdeckung erweitert

    In the Face of Adversity

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    In the Face of Adversity explores the dynamics of translating texts that articulate particular notions of adverse circumstances. The chapters illustrate how literary records of often painful experiences and dissenting voices are at risk of being stripped of their authenticity when not carefully handled by the translator; how cultural moments in which the translation of a text that would have otherwise fallen into oblivion instead gave rise to a translator who enabled its preservation while ultimately coming into their own as an author as a result; and how the difficulties the translator faces in intercultural or transnational constellations in which prejudice plays a role endangers projects meant to facilitate mutual understanding. The authors address translation as a project of making available and preserving a corpus of texts that would otherwise be in danger of becoming censored, misperceived or ignored. They look at translation and adaptation as a project of curating textual models of personal, communal or collective perseverance, and they offer insights into the dynamics of cultural inclusion and exclusion through a series of theoretical frameworks, as well as through a set of concrete case studies drawn from different cultural and historical contexts. The collection also explores some of the venues that artists have pursued by transferring artistic expressions from one medium into another in order to preserve and disseminate important experiences in different cultural settings, media and arts
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