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DissertationDOI

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.
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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

Journal ArticleDOI
John Reichert1
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
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Vilification is a rhetorical strategy that discredits adversaries as ungenuine and malevolent advocates The strategy is pervasive in the rhetoric of pro-life and pro-choice movements in Minnesota between 1973 and 1980 as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Vilification is a rhetorical strategy that discredits adversaries as ungenuine and malevolent advocates The strategy is pervasive in the rhetoric of pro‐life and pro‐choice movements in Minnesota between 1973 and 1980 Both movements characterize their opponents as elite conspiracies whose influence is based upon misuse of powerful agencies and whose motives are tyrannous and unjust Vilification strategies construct the enemy as simultaneously powerful and vulnerable, providing urgency, empowerment, reward, and sustained commitment for members of the movement

97 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors explored two researchers' concerns about instructional recommendations for teaching students how to engage in close reading, a key construct underlying Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts across most of the United States.
Abstract: Implementation of Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts across most of the United States has yielded the rapid creation of new, interconnected literacy assessments, curriculum guidelines, instructional materials, teacher preparation programs, teacher evaluation systems, and professional development. This essay explores two researchers' concerns about instructional recommendations for teaching students how to engage in close reading, a key construct underlying these Standards. Meant to encourage and inform educators' exercise of professional judgment in planning instruction, the essay summarizes explicit and implied shifts in literacy instruction that are suggested by the new standards, examines various competing interpretations of close reading and close reading instruction, and offers research-based instructional recommendations to enable youth to complete close reading tasks effectively, rather than distancing them further from the literacies needed to fulfill their lives.

93 citations

BookDOI
01 Jan 2008
TL;DR: In this article, MDillon et al. discuss the Foucault and Butler on Discourses of Law, War, and Exceptionalism, and the history of modern sovereignty.
Abstract: Introduction MDillon& AWNeal PART I: SITUATING FOUCAULT Strategies for Waging Peace: Foucault as Collaborateur SElden PART II: POLITICS, SOVEREIGNTY, VIOLENCE Goodbye War on Terror? Foucault and Butler on Discourses of Law, War and Exceptionalism AWNeal Life Struggles: War, Discipline, and Biopolitics in the Thought of Michel Foucault JReid Security: A Field Left Fallow DBigo Revisiting Franco's Death: Life and Death and Bio-Political Governmentality PPalladino PART III: BIOS, NOMOS, RACE Law Versus History: Foucault's Genealogy of Modern Sovereignty MValverde The Politics of Death: Race War, Bio-Power and AIDS in the Post-Apartheid DFassin Security, Race, and War MDillon

91 citations

Journal ArticleDOI

86 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Crowder as discussed by the authors argued that there is a strong form of conflict among values in which one cannot advance or honour one value without losing something in terms of the other, but there is no common measure or ranking.
Abstract: ‘Pluralism’, Crowder writesl, ‘presupposes the possibility of a stronger form of conflict among values than mere incompatibility’. The ‘stronger’ form of conflict to which he refers applies to situations in which it is not only true that one cannot advance or honour one value without losing something in terms of the other, but, in addition to this, there is no ‘common measure or ranking’. This means, for one thing, that there is no common currency of comparison, such as that promised by Utilitarianism. It also means something wider (though Crowder himself does not explicitly distinguish the two points), that there is no other determinate and general procedure for solving conflicts, such as a lexical priority rule. It is in this wider sense that values may be said to be ‘incommensurable’. The claim that there are such conflicts (equivalently, that there are incommensurable values) is made by pluralism, in the sense in which Crowder ascribes this position to us and in particular to Berlin. We do not want to disown the pluralist position, so described, but we reject what Crowder infers from it. Crowder claims that according to pluralism choices among incommensurable values ‘are “underdetermined by reason” or contain an element of rational “indeterminacy”’. It is crucially unclear what Crowder means by these phrases (which are quoted from other writers, not from either of us). He admits that people can choose in situations of conflict, and that ‘no doubt they can offer reasons for their choice’. So far, this sounds quite encouraging. However, Crowder supposes that there is a serious limitation on what the pluralist can admit beyond this. The problem is that he does not make clear what he takes this limitation to be. Sometimes as when he asks rhetorically whether ‘justice is more important than loyalty’ his point seems to be merely that given two values that are capable of conflicting, the pluralist will deny that one of them in every conflict trumps the other. This simply repeats the claim that there is no priority rule. Moreover, for many kinds of conflict, it is what a reasonable person would expect. What justice favours should in a wide variety of cases be pursued at the expense of loyalty, but it is not always so; in other circumstances, it may be reasonable to see loyalty as more important than the considerations of justice that come into the matter. Of course, some people will insist that none of this can arise, and that true justice can never demand a cost in terms of true loyalty, and conversely; but they are people for whom there are no real conflicts between

85 citations