Symbolic Games in A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates

This article will show that postmodern thoughts play an essential role in Joyce Carol Oates’ Wonderland Quartet. In its opening novel A Garden of Earthly Delights, I will also consider the imagery of Lewis Carroll’s Alice texts that influenced Oates’ Quartet. Oates’ and Carroll’s texts share the depiction of decentralised permissiveness and rejection of all authority that I interpret through the aesthetic conception of postmodern games by Gilles Deleuze. By blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, the aspect of violence is repressed in Carroll’s texts. However, Oates aestheticises violence to maximise the diverse impact of postmodern sentiment on American cultural forms that emerged in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to Carroll’s Alice, who demands order to protect herself from the chaos, Clara in A Garden of Earthly Delights rejects conventions and fabricates chaos to alleviate her unprivileged condition.

Revising Postsocialism

This article reflects on the current explanatory value of concepts such as postsocialism and Eastern Europe by exploring how they are represented in contemporary art projects in Estonia. Through an overview of recent exhibitions in which I collaborated with local artists and curators, the research considers generational differences in relation to cultural discourses of the postsocialist experience. Methodologically, artists and curators were not simply my informants in the field, but makers of analytical knowledge themselves in their practice. Exhibitions were also approached as contact zones, whereby new cultural forms are simultaneously reflected and constructed. Critically, this inquiry gathers new ways of representing and conceptualising cultural changes in Estonia and novel perspectives of interpreting the relations to the Soviet past. The focus is put on art practice because of its capacity of bringing together global and local frames of reference simultaneously. The research also draws attention to the inbetweenness of the first post-Soviet generation (those born near the time of the breakup of the USSR); they are revising established cultural forms as well as historical representations through mixing practices, and therefore updating traditional ideas of identity and attachment to places.

Analysis of Genres of the BBC One TV Programs

The relevance of the study is based on the fact that the BBC One channel is interesting as an example of a public service broadcaster which retains its image and competitiveness on the global media market. The goal of the research is to analyze the BBC One programming with regard to its forms of journalists and cameramens work. The semiotic methodology is chosen for interpreting sign systems, i. e. journalists texts or TV frames, as interconnected phenomena of culture. As a result, important sociocultural and philosophical elements integrated into the BBC One programming and determining its genre profile have been revealed. The social mission of the public broadcasting, combination of regional and metropolitan grounds, the prevalence of serious news genres are among them. Moreover, the programs are open for entertaining content including a foreign-made one. There is also a visual and aesthetic adaptation of pre-TV cultural forms of theater and the tabloid press, etc. Therefore, we can speak of a rather flexible programming policy of the BBC One, which can be a good model to develop strategies for public service broadcasters in other countries.

Transformations of Victory Day: “in step with the time”

Статья представляет собой рецензию на коллективную монографию «Памятник и праздник: этнография Дня Победы», обобщающую результаты полевого исследования практик празднования Дня Победы в 23 городах 11 стран. Книга интересна как в сюжетном, так и в теоретическом плане, поскольку затрагивает проблемы дальнейшего развития и современных трудностей memory studies: насколько у этого направления исследований получается идти «в ногу со временем». В центре внимания – не столько политизация памяти, сколько постоянное переплетение и взаимодействие практик коммеморации разного уровня – локальных и транснациональных, поколенческих и семейных, этических и эстетических культурных форм, выходящих за рамки распространенных в современных «мемориальных войнах» бинарных оппозиций. The article is a review of the book "Monument and Holiday: Ethnography of Victory Day", edited by M. Gabovich, which summarizes the results of a study of Victory Day celebrating practices in 23 cities of 11 countries. The book is interesting both in terms of plot and in theoretical terms, since it touches upon the problems of further development and contemporary difficulties of memory studies: to what extent this sphere of research succeeds in “keeping up with the time”. Its focus is not so much on the politicization of memory (especially after the Crimean crisis), as on the constant intertwining and interaction of commemoration practices of different levels - local and transnational, generational and family, ethical and aesthetic cultural forms that go beyond common in contemporary "memory wars" binary oppositions.

Literature in Culture & Culture in Literature: Explain 21ST century

As the cultural environment of the twenty first century comes into clear focus, Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First Century. Literature and culture presents a series of monographs that undertakes the most penetrating and religious analysis of contemporary culture and thoughts. The series is driven by perception that critical thinking today is in a state of transition. The global forces that produce cultural forms are entering into powerful new alignments, which demand new analytical vocabularies in the wake of later twentieth century theory. The series will demonstrate that theory is not simply availed revolutionary gesture that we need to move beyond, but rather brings us to the thresh hold of a new episteme, which will host work that explores the most important emerging critical contours of the 21st century, marrying inventive and imaginative criticism with theoretical and philosophical rigor. The aim of the series will be to produce an enduring account of the 21st century intellectual landscape that will not only stand as a record of the critical nature of our time, but that will also forge new critical language and vocabularies with which to navigate an unfolding age. Keyword: cultural environment, perception, revolutionary, episteme, transition, vocabularies

Thinking Materially: Cognition as Extended and Enacted

Human cognition is extended and enacted. Drawing the boundaries of cognition to include the resources and attributes of the body and materiality allows an examination of how these components interact with the brain as a system, especially over cultural and evolutionary spans of time. Literacy and numeracy provide examples of multigenerational, incremental change in both psychological functioning and material forms. Though we think materiality, its central role in human cognition is often unappreciated, for reasons that include conceptual distribution over multiple material forms, the unconscious transparency of cognitive activity in general, and the different temporalities of metaplastic change in neurons and cultural forms.

Cosplay Phenomenon: Archaic Forms and Updated Meanings

Cosplay is considered as a modern mass practice of copying and public demonstration of the costume, image and behavior of famous heroes in the mass culture: heroes of movies, cartoons, comics, video games within the framework of festivals, processions, activities of clubs of the corresponding subject. The empirical material for the study was observations, publications in specialized mass media, recordings of Russian and foreign electronic broadcasts of cosplay events, interviews with Russian cosplayers. The article provides a cultural and historical analysis of cosplay, on the basis of which it is concluded that the archaic cultural forms of totemic primitive holidays, medieval carnival, and the first forms of theater are reproduced in cosplay. Traditional cultural forms in cosplay are endowed with new cultural meanings, among which are the game principal development in culture, the implementation of special mechanisms of young people socialization through individual and collective forms of identification and imitation of famous characters, creative development of screen culture characters. In cosplay, there is a partial revitalization of archaic cultural forms, such as zoo-mystery, carnival, the first forms of theater. The conclusion is made about the role of cosplay in the development of the visual language of modernity, «de-virtualization» of the mass culture images and the development of the «instinct of theatricality» in a modern person. Cosplay in Russia demonstrates a wider thematic repertoire than cosplay in the USA and Japan: it includes not only images of American films, video games, comics, Japanese manga and anime, but also images of Soviet animation, which paradoxically are capable of direct competition with modern products of mass culture and art.

Accounting for Who We Are and Could Be: Inventing Taxonomies of the Self in an Age of Uncertainty

Self-trackers are confronted with economic and cultural uncertainty as two fundamental traits of late-modern capitalism. Coping with uncertainty in this context means the calculative quest for discovering the representational forms by which the plurality of individual capabilities as well as the plurality of the cultural forms of living can be inscribed into common registers of worth. Drawing on Foucault as well as the Sociology of Critique, this paper emphasizes the moral and cognitive conflicts accompanying the emergence of self-quantification and points to the contradictions and ambivalences this involves: self-inspection as a form of enabling accounting and emancipation, on the one hand, versus an extension of instrumental rationality to hitherto incommensurable and incalculable entities, on the other.