Focal Point Gallery : a new institutional model?

A description is given of how Focal Point Gallery’s (FPG) new building (in Southend-on-Sea, Essex) was conceived in terms of its practical effectiveness in addressing tensions between local and global, utopian, social and political thought, through the commissioning of permanent and temporary artworks – by Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Scott King, Mike Nelson, Elizabeth Price, Allen Rupperberg, Tris Vonna-Michell and Lawrence Weiner – via an ethical curatorial approach involving affirmative modes of criticality. This includes an account of distribution strategies used for FPG’s printed publicity as an artistic program in its own right, and the various platforms, channels and spaces of editorial circulation that informed this curatorial approach

Reading Graphic Novels in School: texts, contexts and the interpretive work of critical reading

This paper uses the example of an extra-curricular Graphic Novel Reading Group in order to explore the institutional critical reading practices that take place in English classrooms in the senior years of secondary school. Drawing on Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities, it questions the restrictive interpretive strategies applied to literary texts in curriculum English. By looking closely at the interpretive strategies pupils apply to a different kind of text (graphic novels) in an alternative context (an extra-curricular space) the paper suggests that there may be other ways of engaging with text that pupils find less alienating, more pleasurable and less reminiscent of 'work'

Kafka at the West Bank checkpoint: de-normalizing the Palestinian encounter before the law

The checkpoint has emerged as a quintessential trope within the contemporary Palestinian imagination, to such an extent that “checkpoint narratives” have arguably come to assume a dangerously “normalized” status as everyday, even iconic features of Palestinian existence. Turning to the films Route 181 by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, and like twenty impossibles by Annemarie Jacir, this article explores how alternative representations (and theorizations) of checkpoint encounter might serve to “de-normalize” the checkpoint in a way that invites us to interrogate the very nature of the checkpoint apparatus in itself, including the nature of the “law” that it represents. Mobilizing the critical paradigms of the “state of exception” and “homo sacer” drawn from the theoretical work of Giorgio Agamben and the literary work of Franz Kafka, the article argues that apprehension of the enduring oddity and abnormality of the checkpoint serves as a vital mode of critical resistance to the policies of “spatio-cide”, “securitization” and colonialism exercised at the hands of the State of Israel through the checkpoint mechanism

Brief an den Vater. English

Germanic Studie