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
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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Book•
07 Apr 2013
TL;DR: The New Edition of Berlin's "The Idea of Freedom" as discussed by the authors is the most complete version of the original Berlin's work and contains a comprehensive bibliography of Berlin and his work.
Abstract: Acknowledgements vii Introduction to the New Edition 1 Introduction to the Original Edition 36 1. The Idea of Freedom 41 2. Pluralism 74 3. History 111 4. Nationalism 133 5. Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment 156 6. Agonistic Liberalism 175 Notes 203 Concise Bibliography of Berlin's Work 215 Index 223
22 citations
TL;DR: The Media, the News, and Democracy: Revisiting the Dewey-Lippman Debate as mentioned in this paper was a seminal work in the history of the media, the news, and democracy.
Abstract: (2006). The Media, the News, and Democracy: Revisiting the Dewey-Lippman Debate. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 135-152.
22 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss l'analyse de la communication politique pendant les annees 1940 aux Etats-Unis and affirme que c'est la confrontation avec l'horreur nazie qui a stimule l'etude de the communication.
Abstract: L'A. porte son attention sur l'analyse de la communication politique pendant les annees 1940 aux Etats-Unis. Il souligne l'importance de la reception de la sociologie weberienne et de la perspective durkheimienne. Il montre que, pendant les annees 1930, les chercheurs ont plus particulierement porte leur attention sur l'analyse des mecanismes de propagande. Il souligne l'influence de l'analyse du mal par Arendt et la perspective d'E. Levinas concernant l'apprehension des differences. Il affirme que c'est la confrontation avec l'horreur nazie qui a stimule l'etude de la communication
18 citations
18 citations
TL;DR: McEwan as discussed by the authors examines how Ian McEwan in his novel Saturday (2005) adds a specifically affective element to the human engagement with narrative through a focus on the neurobiology of consciousness.
Abstract: Drawing on cognitive science, literary critics such as Mark Turner have affirmed that for human beings thinking is crucially bound up with narrative. This essay examines how Ian McEwan in his novel Saturday (2005) adds a specifically affective element to the human engagement with narrative through a focus on the neurobiology of consciousness. By castihg a neurosurgeon as his protagonist, McEwan attends to what damaged brains caii reveal about how story-loving human beings "mind" the world. Moreover, in this essay the work of Gerald Edelman in neuroscience and Lisa Feldman Barrett in psychology is cited to bring together disparate fields in affirming that affective feelings convey information about tbe interface between self and environment. By setting the novel in a single day in London, after g/11 and during preparations for war in: Iraq, McEwan affirms a constructivist theory of knowledge, in which individuals and collectives —including novelists— participate in making up meaningful presents and livable futures. Saturday provides a meditation on how we might further bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences of mind through cautious collaborations based on the biological rootedness of storytelling, the centrality of feeling to thinking, and a shared empiricism that embraces human activities of interpretation balanced by testing, calibration,
18 citations