Wokisme et Théorie du genre, une nouvelle étape des Lumières ?

Teksty Drugie, 2012

Contemporary Political Theory, 2019

Luka ´cs occupies an important position in the whole history of Western Marxism. The central category of reification Luka ´cs puts forward in History and Class Consciousness has been criticized for its Romantic humanism. Centering on Luka ´cs's concept of reification, Richard Westerman has done extraordinary and innovative work. Westerman's aim 'is to recontextualize Luka ´cs within a quite different set of discourses, which are related by their attempts to explain meaning in terms of a formal structure independent of both subject and object' (p. x). In order to achieve this goal, Westerman reads the central essays of History and Class Consciousness in relation to the sketches of a philosophy of art Luka ´cs produced while working in Heidelberg between 1912 and 1918. These provided key elements of the hidden philosophical scaffolding of his early Marxian theory. Westerman reinterprets Luka ´cs's reification through the method of phenomenology, which sheds a very different light on his thought and presents us with a very different Luka ´cs from the one we are familiar with. In this sense, the richness and heterogeneity of Luka ´cs's 'legacy' is given its due. The book is divided into three sections: (1) The Road to Reification, (2) The Phenomenology of Capitalism, and (3) Beyond the Proletarian Revolution. They, respectively, reinterpret Luka ´cs's theory of social development, of social critique, and of social revolution. The first section offers intellectual-historical justification for this reading of Luka ´cs by examining the development of his thought in the years leading up to his embrace of Bolshevism. Westerman examines the drafting of a philosophy of art while studying at Heidelberg in the Weber circle. First, he identifies thinkers that Luka ´cs engaged with extensively and explicitly and regards them as major sources of Luka ´cs's thought. Luka ´cs developed a 'phenomenological' model of analysis, using avowedly Husserlian language, to describe art, as well as the creative and receptive stances towards it. Luka ´cs adumbrated a phenomenological ontology that treated the significance and meaning of objects as an inextricable part of what they

UCD Philosophy M.A. Thesis, 2019

This M.A. Thesis suggests a re-reading of Georg Lukács' early philosophy (1908-1923), that centers on the issue of representation, taken as the form--in a Kantian sense--of both the artwork, and of meaning production generally. Unlike Kant, however, Lukács understands form, from its origins the "mimesis" of Classical Greek poetics, as an intersubjective process and as historically contingent. Accordingly, he traces the evolution of representation from Classical Greece to modern times, along the axes of embodiment, erotics, temporality, and production/reproduction. Part I of the thesis gives an exposition of Lukács' modernism, and considers some of the tensions it creates between the ethical and aesthetic, both informed by and critical of the contributions of Georg Markus, Dennis Crow, and Frederic Jameson. Lukács' aesthetics, I argue, lays the groundwork for his Marxist "turn" in History and Class Consciousness (1923), whose critique of capitalism and the commodity form hinges on the relation between aesthetic production and history. This is not a new, "Marxist" insight for Lukács which would reduce the relation of art to history (and perhaps modernism itself) to class ideologies, but is rather an "existential" subtheme found in his early critical essays on Expressionism, as well as in the writings of his Hungarian collaborator, Lajos Fulep. Accordingly, Part II of the thesis fleshes out the aesthetic role of history in History and Class Consciousness, reading the ethical and aesthetic deficiencies of reification through Lukacs' writings in Soul and Form and Theory of the Novel, and in terms of his modernist aesthetics.

2012

Revista Musica, 2019

The argument of this article is structured as follows: The recognition of some artists perceived as effeminate and of others as homosexuals coexisted with the reproduction of prejudices in medical and literary discourse. Women are a numerical majority in musical education institutions, and in parallel, medical and literary discourse reproduces the belief in female inferiority. From the text of a conference on Chopin, I analyze three topics of the doctor and writer Aloysio de Castro by contrasting them with the ideas of four homosexuality specialists and some ideas of musicologist Mário de Andrade. The primary sources are from the first half of the twentieth century, and my appreciations have references in the review of the literature on racism, gender, and music.

Sophia Colloquia Gender Studies in Belgium: A State of the Art, 2021

Dans les universités belges francophones comme en France (Lasserre, 2016), les études de genre continuent d’être marginales, et particulièrement dans le domaine des études littéraires, une discipline elle-même dévaluée par les institutions universitaires, de plus en plus soumises à des impératifs économiques et sociaux auxquels la littérature est, paraît-il, étrangère. Longtemps, le gender est passé pour un américanisme insupportable, inutile et même intraduisible (Fougeyrollas-Schwebel et al., 2003). Un tel évincement demeure étonnant, au vu des liens que les études de genre entretiennent avec la littérature et la recherche françaises. On sait combien le féminisme matérialiste a participé à l’appréhension du genre en tant que construction sociale (Delphy, 1975) en France et le rôle qu’a joué la French Theory, tirée des travaux de Beauvoir, Derrida ou Foucault, dans la construction des gender studies (Butler, 1990). C’est d’ailleurs une œuvre française, À la recherche du temps perdu de Proust, qui a servi de matériau aux premières théorisations queer (Sedgwick, 1990). De plus, l’existence d’une tradition francophone d’histoire des femmes et des homosexualités, dont les études littéraires ont pu s’enrichir (Planté, 1989 ; Fernandez, 1989), aurait pu favoriser l’accueil aux concepts anglo-saxons dans la discipline. Dans ce contexte de paradoxes et de conflits à la fois théoriques et politiques, les chercheur·ses francophones ambitionnant d’entrecroiser le genre et la littérature sont très souvent confronté·es à deux problèmes, au moins. D’une part, il leur est nécessaire d’appréhender des concepts épistémologiques et des procédés méthodologiques au croisement de disciplines extralittéraires et de traditions linguistiques étrangères. Ainsi, comment s’outiller adéquatement ? Quelles théories ou méthodes adopter pour produire, au moyen des études de genre, de nouveaux savoirs sur la littérature ? De quels outils rhétoriques et didactiques s’équiper pour justifier une telle démarche dans un champ académique qui dévalorise ces savoirs en les réduisant à des partis pris idéologiques ? D’autre part, et à l’inverse, il est indispensable à ces chercheur·ses de réfléchir aux pouvoirs de la littérature : que peut-elle transmettre aux études de genre ? Si la littérature est « partie prenante d’un travail des représentations [...] où se produisent (se manifestent et se fabriquent) les conflits relatifs aux normes de sexe et aux effets de pouvoir qui s’y attachent » (Lotterie, 2016), les études littéraires, oubliées des études genre en francophonie, ne doivent-elles pas s’emparer de ces questions pour enrichir originalement ce champ interdisciplinaire ? Pour répondre à toutes ces questions, nous avons organisé deux journées de conférences, tables-rondes et workshops adressés aux doctorant·es et étudiant·es en littérature (octobre 2021). Notre communication, à six voix, sera l’occasion d’opérer un retour critique sur cette expérience, de tracer les contours de la recherche croisant genre et littérature en Belgique, et d’envisager son avenir et ses potentialités.

Popularisation and Populism in the Visual Arts (edited by Anna Schober), 2020

As the title "The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain" suggests, Amélie, the heroine of the famous French movie, lives a fabulous life. The figure of Amélie does not only represent the contemporary everybody, but serves as a model for a creative self that aesthetically valorises ordinary reality and enchants everyday life. On this account, the article will analyse the cultural economy that informs this imaginary. We will argue that the belief in the extraordinariness of ordinary life is informed by an aesthetico-political discourse moulded by artists and critical cultural theorists who envision a re-creative counter-image to the functional rationalisation of modern lifeworld. Reconstructing the modern imaginary of the everyday, we will show that the ideal of enchanting ordinary life is driven by an emancipatory hope and by the belief in the profanation of culture. The strategy of profanation is to be understood as a becoming ordinary of culture with the critical objective to challenge the superiority and the ideals of bourgeois culture. Nonetheless, the film points to the fact that the critical discourse on the ludic politics of ordinariness, has now spread into mainstream popular culture. So, how to understand the popularisation of this imaginary of cultural critique? The popularized revaluation of ordinary life does not, as we will argue, mark a cultural critical strategy that aims to fracture the symbolic or the economic logics of late modern society and bourgeois culture. To the contrary, this cultural figure upholds an ethos that already informed the formation of modern subjectivity, appropriating the aesthetic values and the economic norms that Max Weber portrayed as the driving forces in the development of modern capitalist societies.

Crimson Publishers, 2023

The concept of the popular in Greek indigenous contexts and mediaesthetics resonates with the notion of ‘laiko’. The notion of laiko conveys a combination of working class and provincial elements and intersects urban and rural boundaries. Very often this notion takes the form of a music idiom describing the laiko subject deriving from the genre of ‘laiki’ music often performed with a stringed music instrument called bouzouki while its cultural meanings and aesthetics stem from a Turkish colonized past and the orient (e.g. rebetiko). Contemporary laiki music is usually performed in laika night venues such as ellinadika night clubs and pistes (or bouzoukia). What is more, in these environments traditional masculinities and femininities are privileged and performed while sexist, homophobic and heteronormative narratives circulate and reproduce heteropatriarchal, phallocentric and ethnocentric norms. This article analyses the incarnations of laiko and pop music in Greece by queer performers belonging in the Greek LGBTQ+ communities and the drag and ballroom underground scenes who use them in frameworks of alternative music and club entertainment to deconstruct and subvert existing patriarchic and conservative national and religious narratives as well as gender conforming binaries. These queer groups are influenced by female and queer Greek, British and American pop music icons and amalgamate laiko, rap, pop, EDM and EBM qualities to produce drag outcomes and performances. Thus, the article designates the emergent possibilities of an alternative modality of the Greek “popular” and its power for queering and agonistic carnivalesque.

The very concept of 'avant-garde' is steeped in a masculine warlike imagery, and the founding manifesto of Futurism even glorifies the 'contempt for the woman'. Yet, feminine, queer, androgynous, and non-binary perspectives on sexual identity played a central role — from Rimbaud to contemporary experimentalism — in the development of what has been called 'the tradition of the new'. We will explore such a paradoxical anti-traditional tradition through texts, images, sounds, and videos. We will unearth the stories and works of great experimentalists who have been neglected because of their gender. We will deal with poems made up entirely of place names, of recorded noises, of typographical symbols. We will try to read texts with no words, surreal stories, performances, objects.

The production of this thesis has been endlessly rewarding, not only for its intellectual challenges, but for the relationship I was able to build to the art and its maker. Attila Richard Lukacs is not only a brilliant artist, but a warm, kind, and gentle soul. It is my honor to present this thesis in acknowledgement of the 40 th anniversary of his artistic career. Thank you Attila, from the bottom of my heart, for welcoming me into your studio, for sharing the more intimate details of your life, and for your unwavering support of this project. The University of British Columbia and its community also provided key support for this project. Professor Erin Silver served as its encouraging advisor, and has offered generous guidance since its inception. Thank you, Erin, for your caring and compassionate approach to teaching, one that we should all strive to emulate. Professor Joseph Monteyne provided useful art historical advising, offering his unique perspective as a scholar of the Baroque, Lukacs's preferred art historical period to quote and parody. Teresa Sudeyko, too, provided kind assistance in accessing the collections and resources of the Belkin Art Gallery. I also wish to thank the donors Hugo E. Meilicke and Tina and Morris Wagner who established the research fellowships at UBC that have funded this study. I would be amiss if I neglected to acknowledge the support of my parents throughout my studies, especially given the queer focus of my work. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for your steadfast support of my queer art historical practice, and my sisters, for your unconditional love. Lastly, I must acknowledge the degree to which my training in queer art historical methods with Professor Jonathan Katz at the University of Pennsylvania informs this thesis, and indeed my capacities as an art historian in general. Thank you, Jonathan, not only for your invaluable consultations on this thesis, but for giving me a foundation that I will have for life.

This article considers Mariusz Wilk's personal narrative Woloka through the lens of postcolonial theory, analyzing the relationship between Poland and Russia through contemporary travel writing.

Ця стаття є спробою з'ясування жанру маніфесту як дійового способу екстреного заповнення тих неминучих комунікативних лакун, які утворюються між звичним горизонтом традиції і новими поетикальними обріями, що їх відкривають експериментальні пошуки митців. Спостереження над жанром зроблено у двох пер-спективах: синхронічній (структурні прикмети жанру, його видозміни та споріднені форми, стильові риси) і діахронічній (основні етапи становлення й історичного функціонування). LITERARY MANIFESTO AS A PROGRAM PAPER OF GENERATION: THE GENRE STRUCTURE, TYPES AND FUNCTIONS This article is an attempt to elucidate the manifesto genre as an effective way of urgent filling the inevitable communicative gaps that are formed between the conventional horizons of tradition and the new poetic horizons discovered by artists` experimental searches. The observation of the genre is carried out in two perspectives: the synchronic (structural features of the genre, its modifications and related forms, stylistic features) and diachronic (the main stages of formation and historical functioning). Among the genres that function in the historical dialogue of literary generations, trends and groups, the manifesto is characterized by loud and impudent speech, which uncompromisingly reappraises traditions, and promotes innovation instead. Usually the publication of the manifesto becomes a socially significant event that goes beyond the scope of poetics and interpretation in the sphere of cultural politics, because it aims not only to articulate the view of the problem, but also to interest the public, to stir the daily rhythm of literary life, and to encourage adherents to co-operation. From the point of view of receptive poetics, the manifesto can be regarded as a system of aesthetic signals. Their task is to activate the reader’s experience, to shift the established interpretive codes, changing the regular “horizon of expectation”. Due to the fact that the horizon of the reader’s expectation created by the previous tradition does not coincide with the horizons of the new literary movement, the manifesto quickly fills the communicative gap, clarifying the general outlines of the style code – ideological foundations and some of the leading poetic principles. Since the genre has a communicative purpose, it is important to find out by whom or on whose behalf the manifesto is delivered, to whom it is addressed, and what message it aims to convey. In general, the authors of the manifesto tend to create an auto-image of a brave protestant, a decisive fighter and a persistent reformer. The attitude to predecessors is selective: the division into “friends” and “strangers” is regulated by the logic of the manifesto participants’ position in the literary situation. The genre elements of the manifesto are emerging with the beginnings of individual literary works when the authorial personal input gains value in the conditions of literary competition. Frequency of occurrence of this loud genre increases during the transitional periods and epochs of style dynamics, when a change of thematic and genre systems, as well as poetic systems in general, takes place. Historical undertones of romanticism and, especially, early modernism and avant-gardism were marked with conflict tension between conservative and innovative tendencies, when the kaleidoscopic change in stylistic trends was accompanied by numerous manifestos. Observations of the manifesto incline to the thought about the possibility of projecting the literary history, interpreted as the movement of genre systems – on the analogy of the stylistic version of the literary history by Dmytro Chyzhevsky. Keywords: literary manifesto, genre structure, genre type, horizon of tradition, horizon of innovation, conative function.

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2008

An attractive but slippery terrain for productive interaction between history and social science is the social history and analysis of cultural groups, offered as a context for interpreting important cultural achievements. We feel confident in assigning major works to general tendencies, and we know that societies, salons, clubs, coffee-house cliques, and many other types of formal or informal associations are important in generating "enlightenments" or other religious, literary, artistic, juristic, scholarly, and scientific movements. But we have not progressed far along the lines of cultural microsociology and macrosociology, since these were pioneered respectively by Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim sixty years ago (Scheler, 1960;. We know much less than we would like about the formation and constitution of cultural clusters, about their operations, about their transformations and disintegration, or 2 about their after-effects on diverse participants or spectators. Such concepts as discussion, collaboration, stimulation, influence, criticism, and school formation, refer to processes which we only discuss with confidence in narratives. The corresponding macrosociological difficulties are equally stubborn and equally familiar. To express the claims characteristic of sociology of knowledge and to render them plausible, our studies continue to depend more on informal discursive conventions (or hermeneutic elaborations of the same) than they do on well-understood and rigorous analytical frameworks --not to speak of explanatory theory.

UCD M.A. Thesis, 2019

This M.A. Thesis suggests a re-reading of Georg Lukács' early philosophy (1908-1923), that centers on the issue of representation, taken as the form--in a Kantian sense--of both the artwork, and of meaning production generally. Unlike Kant, however, Lukács understands form, from its origins the "mimesis" of Classical Greek poetics, as an intersubjective process and as historically contingent. Accordingly, he traces the evolution of representation from Classical Greece to modern times, along the axes of embodiment, erotics, temporality, and production/reproduction. Part I of the thesis gives an exposition of Lukács' modernism, and considers some of the tensions it creates between the ethical and aesthetic, both informed by and critical of the contributions of Georg Markus, Dennis Crow, and Frederic Jameson. Lukács' aesthetics, I argue, lays the groundwork for his Marxist "turn" in History and Class Consciousness (1923), whose critique of capitalism and the commodity form hinges on the relation between aesthetic production and history. This is not a new, "Marxist" insight for Lukács which would reduce the relation of art to history (and perhaps modernism itself) to class ideologies, but is rather an "existential" subtheme found in his early critical essays on Expressionism, as well as in the writings of his Hungarian collaborator, Lajos Fulep. Accordingly, Part II of the thesis fleshes out the aesthetic role of history in History and Class Consciousness, reading the ethical and aesthetic deficiencies of reification through Lukacs' writings in Soul and Form and Theory of the Novel, and in terms of his modernist aesthetics.