Ian McEwan: A Novel Approach to Political Communication
23 Sep 2014-
About: The article was published on 2014-09-23 and is currently open access. It has received 2 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Political communication.
Citations
More filters
Posted Content•
TL;DR: The moralizing interpreters of Marx and Freud have been identified by as mentioned in this paper as a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion, which they call the "school of suspicion" of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century thought.
Abstract: Paul Ricoeur famously dubbed that great triumvirate of late nineteenth - and early twentieth-century thought - Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - "the school of suspicion," by which he meant those thinkers who taught us to regard with suspicion our conscious understandings and experience, whether the deliverances of ordinary psychological introspection about one's desires ("I really want to be rich!"), or the moral categories political leaders and ordinary citizens apply to themselves and the social world they inhabit ("an inheritance tax is an immoral death tax!"). "Beneath" or "behind" the surface lay causal forces that explained the conscious phenomena precisely because they laid bare the true meaning of those phenomena: I don't really want lots of money, I want the love I never got as a child; survivors have no moral claim on an inheritance, but it is in the interests of the ruling classes that we believe they do; and so on. Recent years have been, in now familiar ways, unkind to Marx and Freud. Yet instead of a frontal assault on the critiques of the explanatory programs of Marx and Freud, the defense of their legacy in the English-speaking world has gradually fallen to those I will call moralizing interpreters of their thought. The moralizing readers de-emphasize (or simply reject) the explanatory and causal claims in the work of Marx and Freud, and try to marry more-or-less Marxian and Freudian ideas to various themes in normative ethics and political philosophy. Explanation of phenomena is abandoned in favor of the more traditional philosophical enterprise of justification, whether of the just distribution of resources or the possibility of morality's authority. So, for example, G.A. Cohen, the most influential of English-language Marx interpreters in recent decades, has declared that "Marxism has lost much or most of its [empirical] carapace, its hard shell of supposed fact" and that, as a result, "Marxists . . . are increasingly impelled into normative political philosophy." (Under the influence of Habermas, the Marxist tradition has taken a similar turn on the Continent.) Similarly, a leading moral philosopher notes that, "Just when philosophers of science thought they had buried Freud for the last time, he has quietly reappeared in the writings of moral philosophers" and goes on to claim that "Freud's theory of the superego provides a valuable psychological model for various aspects of (Kant's) Categorical Imperative." On these new renderings, Marx and Freud command our attention because they are really just complements (or correctives) to Rawls or Korsgaard, really just normative theorists who can be made to join in a contemporary dialogue about equality and the authority of morality. Nietzsche, too, has been transformed by moralizing interpreters, though in a somewhat different way. The crucial development here has been the retreat from the natural reading of Nietzsche as a philosopher engaged in an attack on morality - a reading first articulated by the Danish scholar Georg Brandes more than a century ago - in favor of a reading which presents Nietzsche as fundamentally concerned with questions of truth and knowledge: the moralistic scruples of interpreters are satisfied by treating Nietzsche as concerned with something else, something less morally alarming than a "revaluation of values." I shall argue that, in fact, all three of the great practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion have suffered at the hands of moralizing interpreters who have resisted the essentially naturalistic thrust of their conception of philosophical practice. As a matter of both textual exegesis and intellectual importance, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are best read as primarily naturalistic thinkers, that is thinkers who view philosophical inquiry as continuous with a sound empirical understanding of the natural world and the causal forces operative in it. When one understands conscious life naturalistically, in terms of its real causes, one contributes at the same time to a critique of the contents of consciousness: that, in short, is the essence of a hermeneutics of suspicion.
35 citations
TL;DR: Louise M. Rosenblatt as mentioned in this paper argued that the reading transaction is a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances, and that the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities cannot explain the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context.
Abstract: Louise M. Rosenblatt s award-winning work continues increasingly to be read in a wide range of academic fieldsliterary criticism, reading theory, aesthetics, composition, rhetoric, speech communication, and education. Her view of the reading transaction as a unique event involving reader and text at a particular time under particular circumstances rules out the dualistic emphasis of other theories on either the reader or the text as separate and static entities. The transactional concept accounts for the importance of factors such as gender, ethnicity, culture, and socioeconomic context. Essential reading for the specialist, this book is also well suited for courses in criticism, critical theory, rhetoric, and aesthetics.Starting from the same nonfoundationalist premises, Rosenblatt avoids the extreme relativism of postmodern theories derived mainly from Continental sources. A deep understanding of the pragmatism of Dewey, James, and Peirce and of key issues in the social sciences is the basis for a view of language and the reading process that recognizes the potentialities for alternative interpretations and at the same time provides a rationale for the responsible reading of texts.The book has been praised for its lucid explanation of the multidimensional character of the reading processevoking, interpreting, and evaluating the work. The nonliterary (efferent) and the literary (aesthetic) are shown not to be opposites but to represent a continuum of reading behaviors. The author amply illustrates her theoretical points with interpretations of varied texts. The epilogue carries further her critique of rival contemporary theories.\
24 citations
References
More filters
Book•
01 Jan 1994
TL;DR: This article defined fiction and truth as the practice of storytelling truth-value and pretence content and characters reference and "about" aspects, points of view and objectivity relating internal/external and subjective/objective.
Abstract: Introduction: setting the scene. Part 1 Fiction and truth: the practice of storytelling truth-value and pretence content and characters reference and "about" aspects, points of view and objectivity relating internal/external and subjective/objective. Part 2 The limits of fictionality: metaphysics and fictions truth-making and world-making narrative and imagination. Part 3 Literature and truth: literary practice literature and fiction the theory of novelistic truth the propositional theory of literary truth metaphorical truth literature as philosophy the mimetic aspect of literature fiction, literature and value.
141 citations
TL;DR: This article translated eight of Gadamer's best known essays on Plato into English, spanning a period of almost fifty years, and revealed the development and insightfulness of his hermeneutical theory of interpretation.
Abstract: This book is a virtual case study in the application of hermeneutical principles to illuminate philosophical texts. The book contains translations of eight of Gadamer's best known essays on Plato...These studies, spanning a period of almost fifty years, are important not only for what they have to say concerning Plato, but also for what they reveal about the development and insightfulness of Gadamer's hermeneutical theory of interpretation...[He] aims at dialogue with Plato and achieves it."-Jeremiah P. Conway, International Philosophical Quarterly "A remarkable felicitous set of translations."-Martin Warner, Times Higher Education Supplement "Gadamer is among the most eminent followers of Heidegger and rather more accessible that most. It is therefore a service to have these eight essays on Plato, dating from 1934 to 1974, translated competently into English."-Choice "May be the best introduction to Gadamer yet published in this country."-W.G. Regier, Modern Language Notes
140 citations
TL;DR: In the recent, flourishing debate on the nature and significance of postmodernism, architecture appears to occupy a special place as mentioned in this paper, and it is tempting to describe this situation through a Hegelianism: it is as if the Zeitgeist of an epoch approaching its end has reached self-consciousness in those monuments of modern architecture of steel, concrete, and glass.
Abstract: In the recent, flourishing debate on the nature and significance of postmodernism, architecture appears to occupy a special place.' It is tempting to describe this situation through a Hegelianism: it is as if the Zeitgeist of an epoch approaching its end has reached self-consciousness in those monuments of modern architecture of steel, concrete, and glass. Contemplating itself in its objectifications, Spirit has not "recognized" and thus "returned to itself," but has recoiled in horror from its own products. The visible decay of our urban environment, the uncanniness of the modern megalopolis, and the general dehumanization of space appear to prove the Faustian dream to be a nightmare. The dream of an infinitely malleable world, serving as mere receptacle of the desires of an infinitely striving self, unfolding its powers in the process of conquering externality, is one from which we have awakened. Postmodernist architecture, whatever other sources it borrows its inspiration from, is undoubtedly the messenger of the end of this Faustian dream, which had accompanied the self-understanding of the moderns from the beginning.2 The end of the Faustian dream has brought with it a conceptual and semiotic shift in many domains of culture. This shift is not characterized by a moral or political critique of the Faustian aspects of modernity, but by the questioning of the very conceptual framework that made the Faustian dream possible in the first place. The following
136 citations
TL;DR: The field of communication failed to define itself, its intellectual focus, and its mission in a coherent way as mentioned in this paper, focusing especially on the institutional use of the field's central terms and concepts.
Abstract: Why has the field of communication failed to define itself, its intellectual focus, and its mission in a coherent way? This essay explores reasons for this failure, focusing especially on the institutional use of the field's central terms and concepts. Incoherence has been the price of institutional success. What defines communication's unique identity as a field is also what maintains its conceptual confusions. The field is compared to a nation-state. The essay places the field's emergence in the context of the history of the social sciences in order to help illuminate its current crises and to explore how we might find new ways of conceiving the field's intellectual task.
129 citations