This study deals with the functions of the feuilleton, which is in the newspaper but has an important role in the development of literature. The 19th century is a period in which Westernization movements began to enter political and social life. Political developments such as the Tanzimat Edict, the Reform Edict and the acceptance of the Constitutional Monarchy had significant effects on cultural life over time. Newspaper is the most important mass communication tool of that period that accelerates this effect. (...) Journalism has an important role in the introduction and development of Western genres such as novel, Western-style story, theater into Turkish literature. The newspaper, which plays an important role in the change of Turkish literature wih new genres, has cultural effects on large masses of people. The feuilleton, which emerged with the publication of long literary texts in certain series, continued its influence in Turkish journalism for a very long time. Feuilleton paved the way for more people to meet literature by making it possible for long literary texts to appear in the newspaper. Many young writers in Turkish literature became famous for their articles in newspapers. These articles found their place in the newspapers, generally with 'feuilleton'. Feuilleton is a cultural and literary activity in terms of journalism; in case in terms of literature, copyright and translation, especially popular literature, have enabled many works to meet with the reader. Thus, by ensuring the interaction between the reader and the work, he developed rapidly in the literary gathering-place. At the same time, it prevented the authors' book printing costs. Therefore, the feuilleton built a mutually beneficial relationship between literature and journalism, and mediated the revival of intellectual life. (shrink)

Van Dijk argues that it is from news that the majority of people obtain most of their social and political knowledge. Therefore, it should concern us that current research evidence suggests that the discourse of public relations is growing in influence over the discourse of journalism to an extent that journalists are relinquishing their agenda-setting function. Using the concepts of intertextuality and genre, the form and content of examples of public relations material and the news stories which resulted (...) from them are discussed. Erjavec’s method of comparative analysis is employed to examine the texts as well as discuss the discourse processes. Fairclough’s argument that texts are a set of options is used to show that the options journalists are choosing are not necessarily based on the accepted rules of news values. (shrink)

Modern tendencies of genre formatting in printed media in Russia are analyzed in the article. A number of printed periodicals are investigated, namely “Ekonomika i zhizn’”, “Vedomosti”, “Schastlivye roditeli” (more than 1200 texts) and 5 regional Moscow newspapers (“Kolomenskaya Pravda”, “Zarya”, “Orekhovo-Zuevskaya Pravda”, “Serebryanoprudsky Vestnik”, “Khimkinskie Novosti”) comprising more than 400 texts. The author states that formatting of modern printed media and formatting of the used genres occur within the main tendencies of journalism development. They are PR, Westernization, (...) glamorization and usage of Western journalism patterns. It leads to distribution of new text types, such as an advertising article, an ordered article, an image and supporting articles. Some changes in the process of genre formatting in Russia are determined: traditional genre forms characteristic for Russia are reduced and hybrid genres appear instead whereas journalism genres mutate and Western ones are widely applied. This results in news reports as the most popular genres whereas high quality analytical and art-journalistic genres are reduced. (shrink)

This article explores the use of epistemic stance strategies in journalistic discourse in English and Spanish. The linguistic resources of epistemic stance include evidential and modal expressions, as well as verbs of cognitive attitude and expressions of factivity. This article examines the pattern of distribution of epistemic stance expressions in three types of journalistic genres in English and Spanish and the presence of multifunctionality of some evidential expressions in the two languages. The article aims to reveal possible similarities or differences (...) in the use of the stance resources in the various genres and across languages. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the consideration of the issue of influential modifications of the genre system of modern mass media. It has been established that the mass media are one of the main means of communication for the wide audience. The meaning of the words "modification", "mass media", "mobile journalism", "new media" has been studied. The article notes that "new media" appeared in the 60s of the XX century. The main characteristics of the media are presented. It (...) is noted that the most common examples of mass media are television, radio, newspapers, magazines, social media, digital media, the Internet. The textbooks and publications of domestic and foreign scientists, which raise the issue of influential modifications of the genre system of modern mass media are highlighted. It was found that the first media were newspaper, telegraph, radio, television. The study of the main types of media is emphasized: traditional media, print media, electronic broadcasting media, external media, transit media and new media. It is noted that new media is a reconceptualization of traditional media. The aspect of media in the role of a social institution has been studied. It was noted about the significant impact of digitalization on the global media system. The significant influence of the use of the Internet in the political life of the United States is given as an illustrative example. The use of the "video story" technology as one of the strategies for holding the attention of the reader or listener is considered. The focus is on the interactive storytelling made possible by digital media and provides advantages for interactive television and cinema, as well as helping to create virtual and mixed reality in games, contributing to the emergence of new forms of voice games. (shrink)

Professionalization and political engagement are usually placed as incompatible in the case of journalism and the mainstream press, resulting in an identification of cultural resistance exclusively with alternative/amateur vehicles. I will use the concept of journalistic field as introduced by Pierre Bourdieu to review these assumptions and to discuss a form of political resistance that acts in one’s own area of knowledge, is not overtly political and whose effects are not immediately accountable for.Drawing examples from my research on two (...) literary newspapers published in the 1950s in Brazil and Uruguay, this paper will focus on the implications of didacticism for literary criticism as a genre of newswriting. The analysis of these newspapers will lead to a reflection on two main issues: a) the conflict between the professionalization and democratization of literature; and b) the definition of resistance as necessarily an action that is against something. The article will reconsider education in journalism as a form of resistance, taking into account its risks of becoming political indoctrination and commercial manipulation, but emphasizing its potential as a way of expanding access to literature. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the emergence and development of Yakut cinema. The object of the study is the Yakut cinema as a phenomenon of national culture. The first appearance of film installations in the Yakut region at the beginning of the XX century is considered. Attention is drawn to the process of mass cinematography in Soviet times. In parallel, the inclusion of Yakut people in the creative process of participating in the first filming at All-Union film studios in the (...) 1930s is traced. Attention is also drawn to the prominent role of the Yakutkino State Trust, which led the development of Yakut cinema. The author analyzes the reasons for the rapid development of Yakut cinema in the post-Soviet period, related to the appeal to the traditions of the Sakha people, the high level of development of theatrical art in Yakutia, artistic and aesthetic needs and spiritual demands of the audience. The article shows the role of "Sahafilm" in the history of Yakut cinema. The characteristic features of the formation of genres of journalistic cinema, the change of repertoire in the early years of Soviet cinematography and during the Great Patriotic War are revealed. The characteristic features of the post-war reconstruction of the technical equipment and training of personnel of the Yakut cinema are outlined. The genre diversity of films shot during this and subsequent times is shown, when, along with documentaries, feature films also begin to be shot. The development of Yakut cinema is traced against the background of all-Union and all-Russian processes. The formation and development of the main institutions of Yakut cinematography, the growth of the skill of its figures are examined through famous films created by them. For the first time, three stages of the development of Yakut cinema have been identified - from the very beginning to the present day: from "silent cinema" to the birth of the national film industry. (shrink)

The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by widespread optimism about biology and its ability to improve the world. A major catalyst for this enthusiasm was new theories about inheritance and evolution (particularly Hugo de Vries's mutation theory and Mendel's newly rediscovered ideas). In Britain and the USA particularly, an astonishingly diverse variety of writers (from elite scientists to journalists and writers of fiction) took up the task of interpreting these new biological ideas, using a wide range of (...) genres to help their fellow citizens make sense of biology's promise. From these miscellaneous writings a new and distinctive kind of utopianism emerged – the biotopia. Biotopias offered the dream of a perfect, post-natural world, or the nightmare of violated nature (often in the same text), but above all they conveyed a sense that biology was – for the first time – offering humanity unprecedented control over life. Biotopias often visualized the world as a garden perfected for human use, but this vision was tinged with gendered violence, as it became clear that realizing it entailed dispossessing, or even killing, ‘Mother Nature’. Biotopian themes are apparent in journalism, scientific reports and even textbooks, and these non-fiction sources shared many characteristics with intentionally prophetic or utopian fictions. Biotopian themes can be traced back and forth across the porous boundaries between popular and elite writing, showing how biology came to function as public culture. This analysis reveals not only how the historical significance of science is invariably determined outside the scientific world, but also that the ways in which biology was debated during this period continue to characterize today's debates over new biological breakthroughs. (shrink)

This contribution explores how Forrester’s work on cases has opened up an arena that might be called ‘the medical case as a travelling genre’. Although usually focused on the course of disease in an individual patient and authored mostly by one medical author, medical case histories have a social dimension: Once published, they often circulate in networks of scholars. Moreover, scholars of the history of literature have shown that numerous medical cases seem to travel easily beyond the context of (...) medical science into the realm of popular literature and journalism. After tracing the idea of cases travelling in Forrester’s Thinking in Cases, I discuss several contributions by authors who, in the wake of interdisciplinary research on cases in the past two decades, have dealt in different ways with this idea. In the third section, I present my own research on a case of self-crucifixion that was widely discussed in 19th-century Europe. I suggest that understanding the case as a ‘traveling genre’ – an expression borrowed from literary genre theory – highlights the role of readers and publication formats as constitutive for cases, and enables us to see more clearly what cases do for scientists and writers who work with them. (shrink)

We are interested in the study of tweets from trial hearings (LTAP) which is a new digital form of the online journalistic genre: a cross over between judicial chronicles and reports. Supported by new technologies, LTAP serves as an intermediary between judiciary and general public. The LTAP falls into a generic subset of discourse which could be called a “discourse substitute”, since it's a discourse representing another discourse. Therefore, LTAP is thus constitutively a part of the representation of the (...) other discourse. Our goal is to characterize LTAP as a genre that "takes the place of" another discourse, while trying to grasp its specificity compared to other genres in this category. (shrink)

This study examines the linguistic construal and cognitive representation of time and viewpoint in the genre of news narratives. We present a model of mental spaces that involves a News Space in which the deictic center is construed of the news actors at the time the newsworthy events took place, and a Reality Space in which the deictic here-and-now center of journalist and reader is construed. This model explains how the dynamic representation of narrative news discourse, characterized by shifts (...) in time and viewpoint, is steered by linguistic devices. An analysis of Dutch news narratives shows that temporal adverbs such as yesterdayand shifts from present tense to past tense may signal a moveforwardin narrative time, to a viewpoint in the future relative to the narrative now-point, rather thanbackward. These atypical time shifts can be accounted for by presupposing an Intermediate Space located at a point in time between the News Space and the Reality Space where the progression of narrative time comes to a halt and experiences are rather relived than reported. The salience of the Intermediate Space may be signaled by quotative conditionals reflecting the viewpoints of implicitly quoted sources. These results clarify how tense and temporal deixis steer the linguistic construal of time and viewpoint in news narratives, demonstrating that time and viewpoint are closely linked in the cognitive representation of these narratives. (shrink)

Hungarian-born Stefan Lorant's work as a visual and literary editor allowed him to pioneer and develop the genré of picture-based journalism at a period that saw the emergence of modern mass communications. Lorant became a guiding force on an international scale, disseminating his ideas and political knowledge throughout Europe in the late-twenties and thirties by working in Hungary, Germany, and England. His innovative layouts, his "exclusive" interviews and his thirst for knowledge became a familiar part of millions of everyday (...) lives, largely through the pages of his own creations and in particular the legendary Picture Post. Eventually his sphere of influence spread to America where he introduced the concept of the pictorial biography. His vision of photography as a documentary medium inspired Life and Look magazines and paved the way for the eventual emergence of the television documentary. For this he has become recognized as "the godfather" of photojournalism. Lorant's work enlightened the world - yet his own world was shrouded with darkness. His secret past, hidden throughout his lifetime, reveals the changing attitude of sexual politics as it evolved throughout the century. His serial womanizing and scandalous love affairs provide insight into the unhappy alliance between his sexual fulfillment and intellectual frustration, his searching in others for what he could not find within himself. Michael Hallett first interviewed Stefan Lorant in late 1990 and spent the following years researching and interviewing his subject. Hallett examines Lorant's public image, his huge ego, his manipulative nature, and his devious love of subterfuge and confusion. Hallett also reveals Lorant's warmth, his generosity, his callousness, his passions and his extraordinary humanity. This biography encompasses the 20th century, while focusing on the emergence of modern mass communications throughout Europe and the United States. Additionally there is a small but key section that highlights Lorant's pl. (shrink)

Within the field of indie comics, politics are most visible–and most closely scrutinized–in the nonfictional genres of graphic journalism, history, and autobiography. Discussion of these tends to foreground questions of representation and identification; apart from them, as in the film criticism of the Screen era, a certain formalism predominates. Here, the unselfconscious narration of concrete facts and experiences supposedly typifying works such as Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis or Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons may be taken as a shortcoming, a failure (...) to "lay bare the devices" and to foreground the medium, whereas a... (shrink)

“It may be thought that I am prejudiced. Perhaps I am. I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.” 1 When Mark Twain undertook correspondence for San Francisco’s Alta California on a $1250 trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 he had an established reputation as a humorist and was on the cusp of making the transition from journalist to author. Innocents Abroad, “an unvarnished tale” 2 published in 1869 and sewn together with questionable regard for (...) coherence or thematic consistency, sold thirty-one thousand copies in one year. Only Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done better, as Twain himself noted. What made his work such a success? “This book is the record of a pleasure trip” , Twain declared, yet there had already been innumerable pleasure trips and by more established authors than he. The multiplicity and seemingly contradictory narrative stances in Innocents makes any essentialist reading hard to establish and what one stance purports is as likely and easy to prove as any other. In the main though, two bodies of criticism have prevailed hitherto, one seeing the text as flawed by internal discontinuities, the other perceiving that disjointed narration need not preclude a unified authorial consciousness. It is my contention that Twain most likely wrote with at least five entirely separate purposes in mind, none of which coexisted simultaneously: i. The profit, reputation and contractual fulfilment to be had in writing c. 1500 words to newspapers daily. ii. The demonstrable acquisition of high society vocabulary and cultural regard commended by Mrs. Fairbanks and Olivia Langdom. iii. An arrant attack upon Presbyterianism. iv. A break with the codified genre of travel writing. v. The promotion of Twain as healer of a wounded nation. Point v) has gone largely neglected by critics. Yet Twain’s role as a unifier in post Civil-War society, as projector of national identity abroad for the benefit of domestic patriotism, and as healer of war-torn America is a cornerstone to our understanding Innocents. As shall be seen, shades of mental/national injury coexist in the text, alongside a humorous denigration of foreigners. The resultant implied superiority of America and Americans, notwithstanding Twain’s passing jabs at them and in spite of their bloody internecine conflict, is what I term “imperial therapy.”. (shrink)

In analogy with Rousseau's concept of ?civil religion? as a system of ?positive dogmas?, ?without which?, as he observed, ?a man cannot be a good citizen?, this paper advances the concept of ?civil epistemology? as the positive dogmas without which the agents of government actions cannot be held accountable by democratic citizens. The civil epistemology of democracy shapes the citizen's views on the nature of political reality, on how the facts of political reality can be known and by whom. Modern (...) liberal democratic politics assumes that the exercise of political power can be manifest in a visible domain of publicly accessible facts. It rests on the Enlightenment faith in the powers of light and visibility to demystify political power, render political actors more exposed and therefore more honestly accountable and enlist the sense of sight as a vehicle of universal political participation. It is, in this context, that technology has come to play such an important symbolic role in the construction of the particular democratic genre of public action as a political spectacle. Democratic civil epistemology, and technology ? in the widest sense of the word ? as the prototype of action which can be observed in the field of visual perception, uphold the democratic conception of politics as a view. Together they define political actors as visible performers, journalists as observers (who translate actual seeing into virtual seeing) and the citizens as witnesses. (shrink)

Property transaction reports are a hybrid genre that combines the characteristics of news reports and advertisements. However, they are different from the traditional hybridity of advertorials, which carry a full-blown label of ‘advertisement’ or ‘promotional material’ and may repeat the name of a product or service many times. Property transaction reports, as an emerging genre in Hong Kong property magazines, combine the voices of property agencies and journalists in a very subtle and sophisticated manner, which is partly made (...) possible by the ambiguous local citing framework. Although the genre is a more successful mix of voices than advertorials, this is not the result of a conscious attempt to mix two genres. Indeed, it is the result of how two ‘communities of practice’ accommodate their practices to accomplish their tasks. This highlights the importance of ‘practice’ in understanding the complex issue of intertextuality. (shrink)

In the age of artificial intelligence, writing machines or robot authors have already begun to produce narrative texts in a variety of genres, including short stories and poetry, as well as journalistic articles. This article is based on the prospect that the narrative ecosystem is in a transitional period of decisive disconnection as it enters the era of artificial intelligence. The primary force driving this transition is the formidable execution of artificial intelligence algorithms, which fully automate narrative communication and narrative (...) works. This article attempts to lay the groundwork for building a new paradigm of post-narrativity through a critical examination of several detailed themes in narrative semiotics and non-anthropocentric narratology. The process of narrative creation based on artificial intelligence algorithms is a key condition that constitutes post-narrativity. This presupposes a non-anthropocentric view. In the landscape of post-narrativity, human writers, paper books, computer screens, and invisible narrative algorithms are all agents with equal influence. Automated narrative production by algorithms accelerates the repositioning of other existing media and actors, and changes the narrative ecosystem by incorporating new elements into activities such as production, distribution, and reception of narratives. (shrink)

Without question, UFOs are part of popular culture; indeed, one might even talk of them as a popular culture. Without question, Roswell is part of the UFO scene; but it is far from the whole thing, nor is it even the central issue. Still less did the Roswell “culture” spawn humankind's preoccupation with possible alien visitors from outer space or the literary genre of science fiction. Yet if this book is to be believed, Roswell has been the center from (...) which these and yet more matters arose: “through the early years, the single event of Roswell, even without a crumb of proof, augmented every image, word, and sound produced by the mass media” . To call this an enormous overstatement would be a large understatement.Little Gray Men is unfortunately full of such sweeping assertions, so broad as to be implausible on their face and yet unsupported by argument or evidence. Toby Smith even defines popular culture as “communication that may be informative but that principally provides pleasure for the participants” , a description that many scholars of culture or communication might find arguable. Some assertions are not only sweeping but puzzling as well—for example, reference to “the Pavlovian nature of popular culture” or a “rhomboidal, zinc‐tinted” television set . Many more examples can be found without venturing beyond the book's introduction.Chapter 1 asserts that Roswell is “a touchstone for our times.” Chapter 2 is about the rocket pioneer Robert Goddard, who does have a connection to Roswell “the Place” but a most tenuous connection to Roswell “the Incident,” which is supposedly the theme of the book. The UFO Encounter gathering at Roswell in 1997 is described in Chapter 3, and the allegation that Roswellian aliens were transported to Wright‐Patterson Air Force Base constitutes Chapter 4. Books about the Incident are mentioned in Chapter 5, films in Chapter 7, science fiction on television in Chapter 8; in between, Chapter 6 is about the science fiction writer Jack Williamson, whose connection to the Incident is less than noteworthy.The book has no formal bibliography or specific notes, though there is a short chapter entitled “Sources.” Thus, when one reads on page 2 “A book came out, in 1980,” there is no quick or easy way to find out what that book is. So Little Gray Men is not a scholarly book. It is in fact a grab bag of trivia connected, not substantively, but only semantically, through the name “Roswell.”As a piece of journalism, one might describe the book as impressionistic, were it not so misleading. No one could gather from Little Gray Men that the popular culture of ufology has a serious side to it, that competent scientists and social scientists have concerned themselves with issues arising from claims about UFOs in general and, in some small part, from claims about the Roswell incident. It is as though one chose to write about the popular culture of cancer by gathering trivia about cranks, quacks, and survivors while saying nothing about mainstream treatments or the underlying scientific knowledge.Ufology has a vast literature, some of it the give‐and‐take of quite disciplined controversy among competent and informed people. That this book has been entirely ignored by ufologists illustrates that it is, in Wolfgang Pauli's phrase, “not even wrong.”. (shrink)

I.What are the genre characteristics of an autobiography? Is it journalism about anecdotes from the writer’s life? Or is it a personal fiction based on truthful memories that conveys the nature and logic of the writer’s youth? Biographies certainly differ from philosophical texts with their argumentative strategies. How was I to read Germs? If I just read on, like one reads a novel, I might overlook details relevant to the life recounted. Reading intently, in contrast—like you would a (...) philosophy book—might make one miss the peculiar scope of events. Anecdotes may lack insight into the social context, the psychological background, and the future of those involved. A remark from Aristotle about the difference between art (poetry) and history motivates me in this review. Poetry, Aristotle thinks, is more philosophical than history because it delivers universal knowledge:By universal truths are to be understood the kinds of thing a certain type of person will probably or necessarily say or do in a given situation; and this is the aim of poetry, although it gives individual names to its characters. The particular facts of the historian are what, say, Alcibiades did, or what happened to him. (Aristotle, 1986, 1451b7, p. 43–44). (shrink)

This article addresses the extent and ways in which gender inequality in the newspaper coverage of arts and culture has changed in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, 1955-2005. Through a quantitative content analysis, we mapped all articles that appeared in two elite newspapers in each country in four sample years 1955, 1975, 1995, and 2005. First, despite increasing women’s employment in arts and culture and a quantitative feminization of journalism, elite newspaper coverage of women in arts (...) and culture has hardly changed, making up about 20-25 percent consistently over the last 50 years. Second, our results show surprisingly few cross-national differences in the amount of the newspaper coverage devoted to women in arts and culture. Third, although women are underrepresented in the coverage of all artistic genres, there is some evidence of horizontal sex segregation—particularly in architecture and modern dance and fashion —as well as vertical sex segregation—in that attention to women has increased in “highbrow” genres that have declined in status. Finally, as the status of an actor type increases from laymen to artistic directors, the proportion of women decreases in newspaper attention to arts and culture. (shrink)

Reality medical television, an increasingly popular genre, depicts private medical moments between patients and healthcare providers. Journalists aim to educate and inform the public, while the participants in their documentaries—providers and patients—seek to heal and be healed. When journalists and healthcare providers work together at the bedside, moral problems precipitate. During the summer of 2010, ABC aired a documentary, Boston Med, featuring several Boston hospitals. We examine the ethical issues that arise when journalism and medicine intersect. We provide (...) a framework for evaluating the potential benefits and harms of reality medical television, highlighting critical issues such as informed consent, confidentiality, and privacy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:72 Reviews RUSSELL VERSUS THE HAPPINESS INDUSTRY Chad Trainer 1006 Davids Run Phoenixville, pa 19460, usa [email protected] Tim Phillips. Bertrand Russell’sThe Conquest of Happiness; a Modern-Day Interpretation of a Self-Help Classic. Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2010. Pp. 118. 978-1906821 -27-2 (pb). us$11.95. German translation as Bertrand Russells Eroberung des Glücks in a “Business Classics” series (gabal Verlag, 2012). he popular writing Bertrand Russell undertook to make money has long roused (...) the indignation of those interested in his more technical specialized work, and his 1930 The Conquest of Happiness ranks among the more extreme examples of this pot-boiling genre. Ludwig Wittgenstein denounced Russell’s Conquest of Happiness as a “vomitive.” And the best ways of understanding Russell’s own assessments of his book are unclear, owing to the various sentiments his biographers report. According to Ronald Clark, he said: “… The Conquest of Happiness … I am not very proud of”;1 whereas Caroline Moorehead reports “he was later to say that, of all his books, he felt this had done the most good”.2 In his autobiography, Russell allows us how he wrote The Conquest of Happiness at a stage in his life “when I needed much self-command and much that I had learned by painful experience if I was to maintain any endurable level of happiness.”The emotional challenges to which he was subjected at the time he wrote the book “introduced an intolerable tension into every moment of daily life.” Beacon Hill School, which Russell had started with his second wife, Dora, in 1927, was in such dire straits financially by 1930 that Russell was compelled to resort to much popular writing and lecturing in order to remain solvent. In 1930, Dora gave birth to a daughter fathered by the American journalist Grif- fin Barry.This marked the beginning of the end to Russell’s marriage to Dora. Add to the foregoing Russell’s strained relations with Wittgenstein, when the ______ 1 The Life of Bertrand Russell, p. 448. 2 Bertrand Russell, p. 383. q= Reviews 73 former was asked to be one of the examiners for Wittgenstein’s phd at Cambridge. Although the phd was awarded and Wittgenstein secured a grant to conduct research at Trinity College, Cambridge for five years, Russell and Wittgenstein’s interaction at the time resulted in an end to their friendship. In general, however much control Russell may have had over matters at earlier points in his life, 1930 was a time he was largely at the mercy of unstable circumstances.The repose and leisure on which he had depended for his philosophic activity were not then available to him. Personal problems came to the fore and he was more prone to depression than usual. About The Conquest of Happiness, written primarily with the American market in mind, he remarked to the publisher Stanley Unwin: “I think they [Americans] mostly share Al Capone’s ideas of happiness, which are in a somewhat different vein from mine.”The book became a bestseller in America. Tim Phillips writes on business, technology, social change and innovation, and he has published more than a dozen expositions of other famous authors’ works. His book Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness is a faithful tour through this Russell classic. Phillips provides a readable account of the original ’s lucid points. The treatment is certainly not pretentious or obfuscatory, as it abounds with examples of Russell’s points from contemporary pop culture. It features corroborating quotations from other authors and is salted with some results of modern surveys. Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness has good reminders of the differences between the nature of Russell’s times and lifestyle and that of our own, the most notable being the absence during Russell’s day of a happiness industry. Nowadays, we are bombarded with “self-help” books “encouraging us to obsess about ourselves or manipulate others” (p. 9). Moreover, when Russell wrote The Conquest of Happiness, “the idea of an antidepressant pill was as likely as someone walking on the moon and the idea that people could ‘suffer from stress’ was thirty years into the future. For all... (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow takes a fresh look at the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Offering an alternative to the traditional focus on either "highbrow" modernism on the one hand or "lowbrow" popular music on the other, its novel view centers on the wealth of previously overlooked products and practices that bridged the space between these cultural extremes. While seminal attempts to recover middlebrow culture came from literary critics and historians, middlebrow studies is now a (...) burgeoning field within musicology. As the first essay collection on this topic, this handbook has two aims: first, it seeks to explore the middlebrow as a historical phenomenon, excavating the kinds of critical writings, marketing practices, and compositional styles with which it was associated. By reanimating a range of musical practices and products-from symphonic concerts to Broadway musicals, opera criticism to rock journalism, and modern jazz to pop-rock-the contributors investigate how artists, critics, and audiences breached the divide from both above and below. In the process, the handbook chapters push the boundaries of middlebrow studies and demonstrate the category's relevance outside of the mid-twentieth-century Anglophone world by delving into the nineteenth century, interrogating the present day, and looking to Germany, Russia, and beyond. The handbook's second aim is to complicate the disciplinary divisions that have flowed from the entrenched oppositions between high and low genres. Breaking new ground by bringing together scholars of classical and popular music, these chapters trace common middlebrow themes across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Across this broad vista, contributors account for the kinds of syntheses, overlaps, and juxtapositions that made the cultural middle such a richly textured and endlessly contested terrain. Keywords: middlebrow, music history, nineteenth century, twentieth century, popular music studies, modernism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Decline of Literary CriticismRichard A. PosnerRónán McDonald, a lecturer in literature at the University of Reading, has written a short, engaging book the theme of which is evident from the title: The Death of the Critic. Although there is plenty of both academic and journalistic writing about literature, less and less is well described by the term "literary criticism." The literary critics of the first two-thirds or so (...) of the twentieth century, now dead, including poets and other creative writers, such as T. S. Eliot, journalists such as Edmund Wilson, and academic literary critics, as distinct from literary scholars, such as F. R. Leavis in England and Cleanth Brooks in the United States, have so few successors that the very genre, if not yet dead, is moribund.1 McDonald deplores the decline of literary criticism and seeks to explain its causes.In place of literary criticism, McDonald (and many others, such as John Ellis) argue, we have postmodern literary theory, an animal of quite a different color from literary criticism.2 "Texts... are interpreted and analysed with a view to unlocking the social norms and attitudes encoded therein, not assessed or evaluated as integral, self-contained creations" (McDonald, p. 21). "The 'best' [is regarded] as a politically dubious category, with selections made in its name often nurturing hidden and hierarchical agendas"(p. ix). "In a comparatively short time, [End Page 385] academic literary criticism has been transformed. Many [literary critics] now regard social activism as the major purpose of literary criticism." And "people who write about literature now write in a prose thick with impenetrable jargon," which erects a barrier between literary theory and literature.3 The well documented decline in the reading of literature has many causes but one may be the obscurantist and politicized style of teaching literature that is in vogue in many colleges.4But something deeper is involved. After all, most literary teachers are not postmodernists. What has happened is the professionalization, in not altogether a good sense, of literary studies. Let me illustrate. More than half a century ago, Cleanth Brooks published what became a famous book of literary criticism, consisting of close readings of famous poems.5 The New Critics were much taken with the metaphysical poets, the most prominent of whom was John Donne, and the high point of Brooks's book was his brilliant close reading of "Canonization," one of Donne's most famous love poems. Just this year (2008) a professor of literature named Ramie Targoff published John Donne, Soul and Body, which has an extensive treatment of Donne's love poetry, though it does not mention "Canonization." As far as I can judge, Targoff's book is a fine scholarly achievement—well written (and not defaced by jargon), thoroughly researched, thoughtful, imaginative. She argues that contrary to some scholars who have regarded Donne as a Neoplatonist who therefore believed that the highest love is purely spiritual (as it was for Plato), he was, throughout his career—even when he became a fiercely devout Anglican cleric writing fervid religious verse—a believer that body and soul were one in all activities, including sexual love; hence the religious imagery in "Canonization," emphasized by Cleanth Brooks, who would I think have found Targoff's analysis congenial. Her book is I would guess a model of modern literary scholarship.But here is the difference between Brooks's book, and specifically his discussion of Donne's poem, and Targoff's. Brooks, who though a distinguished Yale English professor did not have a Ph.D., wrote for a mixed audience—academics, students, the general reader—and he made the nonacademic members of that audience want to read Donne, or read more Donne, or re-read Donne with greater understanding and enjoyment. Targoff writes for other scholars of early modern English literature. Someone else who chances on the book (like me) may read it and think well of it, but unless one has esoteric religious or philosophical interests the experience of reading her book will not quicken one's [End Page 386] interest in reading Donne's poetry—which is a great shame, given the state of the literary culture... (shrink)

The media coverage of immigration serves as an important test for modern democracies’ ability to handle difficult public issues. Systematic and comparative studies over longer time periods are, however, still rare. This is deeply unfortunate as the nature of both immigration and the press systems vary considerably not only across nations but also over time. This article charts the immigration debate in seven Scandinavian newspapers from the birth of modern immigration in the early seventies to the present-day situation. While supporting (...) claims about a general historical shift towards a more problematizing and cultural discourse in Scandinavia, the analysis also identifies major differences in how countries, publications, and genres have handled this complex issue, which brings out fundamental dilemmas for both modern welfare states and journalists. Using the method of multiple correspondence analysis and subsequent cluster analysis, the article also demonstrates how historical press coverage can be fruitfully studied using Geometric Data Analysis as an alternative to frequentist methods. (shrink)

The essays in this special issue of HEC Forum provide reflections that make explicit the implicit anthropology that our current pandemic has brought but which in the medical ethics literature around COVID-19 has to a great extent ignored. Three of the essays are clearly “journalistic” as a literary genre: one by a hospital chaplain, one by a medical student in her pre-clinical years, and one by a fourth-year medical student who reports her experience as she completed her undergraduate clerkships (...) and applied for positions in graduate medical education. Other essays explore the pandemic from historical, sociological, and economic perspectives, particularly how triage policies have been found to be largely blind to structural healthcare disparities, while simultaneously unable to appropriately address those disparities. Central issues that need to be addressed in triage are not just whether a utilitarian response is the most just response, but what exactly is the greatest good for the greatest number? Together, the essays in this special issue of HEC Forum create a call for a more anthropological approach to understanding health and healthcare. The narrow approach of viewing health as resulting primarily from healthcare will continue to hinder advances and perpetuate disparities. Health outcomes result from a complex interaction of various social, economic, cultural, historical, and political factors. Advancing healthcare requires contextualizing the health of populations amongst these factors. The COVID-19 pandemic has made us keenly aware of how interdependent our health as a society can be. (shrink)

This article proposes a typology of the epistemology of live blogging through an analysis of two live news blogs: Radio New Zealand News’ live blog of a significant earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in November 2016 and BBC News’ live blog of the Brexit referendum result in June 2016. We use these cases to draw out five features of the genre that we suggest may characterise other live news blogs. We demonstrate that these blogs tend to produce a fragmentary (...) narrative that reflects particular moments in time, curate an array of textual objects from a range of information sources to produce ‘networked balance’, gain coherence from an often informal authorial voice or voices and generate claims to knowledge of events which are simultaneously dynamic and fragile. This typology contributes to understanding journalism’s position within networked information spaces. (shrink)

Introduction Grady Hendrix is an American author and journalist who is also one of the founders of the New York Asian Film Festival. Horrostör: A Novel was published in 2014 by Quirk Books, a publisher based in Philadelphia and distributed by Penguin Random House. According to its website, Quirk Books was founded in 2002 and publishes ‘a highly curated list of entertaining, enlightening, and strikingly unconventional books for adults and children in a number of genres and categories,’ which i...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“It’s not true, but I believe it”: Discussions on jettatura in Naples between the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth CenturiesFrancesco Paolo de CegliaIntroduction: What is Jettatura?Non èvero...ma ci credo (“It’s not true... but I believe it”) is the title of a comedy by the Italian actor and playwright, Peppino De Filippo, younger brother of the more famous Eduardo, which was staged for the first time (...) in 1942. The narrated events take place in the twentieth century and concern Gervasio Savastano, a Neapolitan businessman who is tormented by the fear of jettatura. The character, victim of grotesque events, first sacks a worker, believing him to be a jettatore, and then hires another, who is a hunchback and so should bring him good luck. In the end, however, it is discovered that the presumed jettatore has never harmed anyone and that the hunchback is not what he seems: he has stuffed his jacket in order to enter into the good graces of the gullible businessman and marry his daughter, with whom he has planned a con trick. The “lucky” events ascribed to his presence can therefore be considered casual. The epilogue? In keeping with the logic of compromise, typical of the brothers De Filippo’s theater, even though the character is rationally convinced of the unfounded nature of his beliefs, he remains adamant: “It’s not true, but I believe it” in other words.1 [End Page 75]“Where I come from, jettatura rules,” wrote the journalist and scriptwriter Giuseppe Marotta in 1947. Indeed, it is still a part of popular Neapolitan culture today.2 Often confused with similar beliefs, such as fascination (fascino) and the evil eye (malocchio), jettatura assumed its present form between the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, at a time when a polite debate on its nature was taking shape in the city. In this period, the epistemological pluralism animating the discussions was translated into a variety of interpretative hypotheses and literary genres, in which grotesque atmospheres and spirited quips also found room, all perfectly in line with what could be considered the Weltanschauung of Savastano. It is the purpose of this article to examine these discussions, which even spread the term abroad and, with it, the “local color” of the concept.Nineteenth-century European writers on jettatura knew the Neapolitan authors well, and either quoted them explicitly or associated them with characters whose names were a deformation of real people’s: for example, Volitta for Valletta (Stendhal), don Jo (Stendhal) or Ojori (Dumas) for De Jorio. They explained that jettatura corresponded to the more familiar evil eye, but they left the term in Italian, as if to underline the fact that it was untranslatable.Is jettatura a mere anthropological issue, linked to a “primitive” culture, in the face of which official science would remain refractory? A belief that could not be exported or shared by those educated in more “highly developed” contexts? Well, in part, yes. Nevertheless, in the 1840s there was a visitor to Naples who expressed himself in the following terms: “When a foreigner arrives in Naples, at first he laughs at jettatura, then, little by little, he becomes troubled by it, and finally, after a stay of three months, you will see him covered in horns and with his right hand forever clenched [to ward off evil].”3 [End Page 76]So wrote the novelist Alexandre Dumas, père, one of the many travellers who, after having completed the Grand Tour of southern Italy, decided to describe its picturesque scenes and backward customs.4 Creating a veritable topos of travel literature, in the same period the philologist Karl August Mayer commented, “often foreigners let themselves be influenced” by local “superstitions.”5 Indeed many of them were captivated by these Neapolitan beliefs, despite their desire to remain objective and detached; and so they were “converted,” and driven to seek scientific explanations, often after meeting “a Real Jettatore,” whose image had nothing in common with the exotic fantasies of “a French Novelist’s Idea of Jettatore.”6Actually, Dumas and Mayer probably exaggerated somewhat in order to make their descriptions more... (shrink)

As will be argued in what follows, the central question of the death penalty is the question of time. That question begins, in the present case, with the time of a writing that attempts to address what we call current events, particularly an academic writing—as distinct, for example, from journalistic writing—whose rhythms of composition and publication obey particular protocols and render problematic the specifics of what we call political intervention, the relevance or efficacy of which is normally determined by a (...) certain “punctuality.” Hence Zola’s “J’accuse,” a paradigm within the genre of public intellectual intervention, published in L’Aurore on 13 January 1898. I do not know how to resolve the tension .. (shrink)

By presenting a case study based on the argumentative analysis of news in the press, this article introduces and discusses strategic manoeuvring with contextual frames. Drawing on the linguistic notion of frame, I introduce the concept of contextual frame to refer to the news context, that is, the background against which a certain event is presented as a piece of news. I argue that newspapers and journalists make use of contextual frames in the apparently neutral genre of news reporting (...) to propose specific interpretations of the facts at issue, which become the basis for explicit comments and editorials. To show how this works, I investigate in detail a case of newspaper coverage of a complex episode using the pragma-dialectical notion of strategic manoeuvring and the Argumentum Model of Topics to analyse argument schemes. I show that, in the use of contextual frames, there is a prominent relation between presentational devices and topical potential; contextual frames provide the implicit material premises which are at the basis of argumentations through which newspapers interpret and comment on the news. (shrink)

In this study, I examined 12 reports published by a neoliberal think tank proposing to reshape public education in New Zealand. In terms of the larger social processes and structures involved, the think tank’s self-declared positioning of this advocacy is that of a primary definer, ostensibly an expert voice, communicating through the media. My two research goals in this study were to identify the types of educational change being promoted and to uncover the discursive means employed. The sample of 12 (...) reports, published from 2013 to 2018, comprised 647 pages of text. I performed three types of analysis: thematic analysis to identify the ideology of the advocacy, genre analysis of their discursive resources and corpus analysis. The thematic findings reveal proposals to reshape public education through performativity, managerialism and marketization. The genre analysis found the reports followed the structure of the business case genre and drew on elements of business memos, data presentation, sound bite and opinion journalism. The corpus findings provide further linguistic evidence for the main themes. (shrink)

“A great story, full of twists and turns.... Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie.” —Stanley Fish, _Think Again, New York Times_ “In such a difficult genre, full of traps and obstacles, French Theory is a success and a remarkable book in every respect: it (...) is fair, balanced, and informed. I am sure this book will become the reference on both sides of the Atlantic.” —Jacques Derrida “The Atlantic Ocean has two sides, and so does French Theory. Reinvented in America and betrayed in its own country, it has become the most radical intellectual movement in the West with global reach, rewriting Marx in light of late capitalism. Breathtakingly moving back and forth between the two cultures, Francois Cusset takes us through a dazzling intellectual adventure that illuminates the past thirty years, and many more decades to come.” —Sylvere Lotringer During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock ‘n’ roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation. Outside the academy, “French theory” had a profound impact on the era’s emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At the same time in academic departments across the country, their poststructuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America’s cultural and intellectual fabric. French Theory is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. François Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today-showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life. François Cusset, a writer and intellectual historian, teaches contemporary French thought in Paris at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and at Columbia University’s Reid Hall. His books include Queer Critics and La Décennie. Jeff Fort is assistant professor of French at the University of California, Davis. He has translated works by Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, and Jean-Luc Nancy. (shrink)

"Faction" is a hybrid genre, aiming at the factual accuracy of journalism on the one hand and the literary form of the novel on the other. There is a fundamental tension however between those two aims, given the constraints which factual accuracy places on characterization, plot, and thematic exploration characteristic of the novel. Further, faction cannot be defended on the grounds that factual accuracy is a literary value in faction. Finally, some aspects of faction, such as its inability (...) to refer to sources or provide an analytic framework for a narrative, hinder rather than facilitate the communication of facts. (shrink)

This study investigates how reality television viewing is linked to Facebook. Utilizing a survey of 736 students in a school of journalism at a large Midwestern university, researchers examined whether viewers of different genres of reality television were more prone to problematic information sharing on Facebook. The study found that all viewers of reality were prone to problematic information sharing. However, viewers of drama-, competition-, and crime-based shows were most likely to share problematic information. These results are interpreted using (...) social cognitive theory. (shrink)

Michael Sandel’s latest book is not a scholarly work but is clearly intended as a work of public philosophy—a contribution to public rather than academic discourse. The book makes two moves. The first, which takes up most of it, is to demonstrate by means of a great many examples, mostly culled from newspaper stories, that markets and money corrupt—degrade—the goods they are used to allocate. The second follows from the first as Sandel’s proposed solution: we as a society should deliberate (...) together about the proper meaning and purpose of various goods, relationships, and activities (such as baseball and education) and how they should be valued. -/- Public philosophy is a different genre from academic philosophy, but that does not mean that it cannot be held to high standards. In my view, while this book does provide food for thought and food for conversation, it nevertheless has significant failings as a work of public philosophy rather than journalistic social activism on the model of Naomi Klein’s No logo (1999). (shrink)

What part should description play in coming to judgment? Questions about genre have become more important in religious ethics as many seek to reform “thin” models of ethical arbitration by recourse to artistic, literary, and historical descriptions in their texts. In this book discussion, I explore what the consequences would be of pursuing this reform by turning to social anthropology—a discipline that relies on extensive empirical descriptions. I do this by considering the anthropology of ethics: a movement that seeks, (...) for the first time, to devote systematic and sustained attention the moral lives of ethnographic informants. I focus on the ways that authors within this field attempt to arrive at more realistic portraits of the different ways societies play out the familiar ethical themes of freedom, responsibility, suffering and agency. Their work challenges religious ethicists to consider what ethical conversation across these differences would look like, and thus to reconsider the relationship between description and judgment in their work. (shrink)

Paisley Livingston on Stanislaw Lem and the history and philosophy of Virtual Reality. The technologies and speculations associated with “virtual reality” and cognate terms have recently made it possible for scores of journalists and academics to develop variations on a favorite theme - the newness of the new, and more specifically, the newness of that new and wildly different world-historical epoch, era, or Zeitgeist into which we are supposedly entering with the creation of powerful new machines of simulation. The innovative (...) powers of the machines of virtual reality are so extensive, it would seem, that they are even supposed to be able to achieve the extraordinary feat of revitalizing that tired journalist genre, “gee-whiz” scientific reporting. “Gee whiz,” one can now read, “you just put on a data glove and don the head-mounted display helmet, and step right into a whole new world where the old reality - and even the tired, old-fashioned notion of reality as such - gets replaced by the non-existent reality simulated by the machine. You can fight battles and have sex with people who aren’t anywhere near you, or who never even existed. Why you can actually, I mean really, interact with an illusion!”. (shrink)

William Godwin, also known as Edward Baldwin and Theophilus Marcliffe, (1756-1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and one of the first modern proponents of philosophical anarchism. He is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a year: Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (1793), an attack on political institutions, and Caleb Williams; or, Things as They Are (...) (1794), which attacks aristocratic privilege, but also is virtually the first mystery novel. He wrote prolifically in the genres of novels, history and demography throughout his life time. With his wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, he wrote children's primers on Biblical and classical history, which he published along with such works as Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales From Shakespeare. He also has had considerable influence on British literature and literary culture. His other works include Memoirs of the Author of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' (1798), Life of Chaucer (1803), Cloudesley (1830) and Deloraine (1833). (shrink)

This study identifies and predicts the factors that determine journalists’ acceptance of VR in journalism and news production, and their intention to adopt this technology in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). A total of 787 online survey responses were analyzed. On a theoretical level, Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) constructs were used to identify the independent variables and develop the research hypotheses. The study found that perceived efficiency of VR is related to the perceived ease of use and (...) perceived usefulness of VR in journalism. Respondents’ behavioral intentions to accept and adopt VR in journalism are contingent upon how these journalists perceive VR as an innovative way to reach audiences and engage them. The paper contributes to our understanding of respondents’ behavioral intentions to accept and adopt VR in journalism. Those intensions are contingent upon how these journalists perceive VR as an innovative way to reach audiences and engage them, including how various media outlets around the world are using VR. (shrink)

Philosophy is textual - it is written and it is read - yet today much of philosophy regards itself as a kind of science, sometimes reducing itself to a species of intellectual bureaucracy. It is important to see these qualities as having their own aesthetic. Even realism is a genre. The aesthetic of the empirical and the bureaucratic, the aesthetic of the rhapsodic and of the clinical... in each of these the genres of philosophy are as creative as they (...) ever were. They are productive of worlds, not only worlds of thought, but 'real worlds' enabled by the technological and other changes that thought has envisaged. This book explores genres through the history of philosophy, providing new ways of thinking about philosophical writing. Exploring a wide range of both European and analytic philosophers and their works - including Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Derrida and Rorty - Genres of Philosophy explores the reading and writing of philosophers who themselves read and write, revealing the textual relation to the history of philosophy. While the focus of the book is in aesthetics, Ferrell reveals that the interest in philosophy's writing turns out to be a metaphysical question. The question becomes one of evaluating the ontological basis for writing - its subject and its means of expression - within a world of thought which is presently captivated by a particular aesthetic, that of the empiricist. Presenting fresh readings of classic texts in aesthetics, and offering an original approach to the question of philosophical writing, this unique analysis will prove of particular interest to readers in European philosophy, the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and literary studies. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the lack of interest, among analytic moral philosophers, in the contingencies of our moral present, produces an impoverished moral philosophy, unable to address the moral problems and quandaries of ordinary people. What is needed to remedy this is a broadening of the scope of the moral philosopher’s thought to include a rich attention to moral phenomena of the present. One such phenomenon, attended to by sociologists and critical journalists over the past few decades, is (...) the contemporary proliferating genre of psychologically oriented self-help literature. I display a range of sociological responses to self-help in order to point out aspects of morality that are made visible in these discussions, whereas they often remain invisible in standard moral philosophy. The aim is not to suggest a specific methodology for including such material into philosophical discussions, but rather to urge philosophers to reconsider the range of materials they attend to in their work, in order to produce a more lively engagement with and understanding of contemporary morality. (shrink)

This article examines a recent shift in the organization of prime-time news on Greek private television, from the `one-way' dissemination of information to an interactive format, where the news genre meets the talk show. By drawing on Hunston's model of evaluation in written academic discourse, it is argued that this conversational news format serves as a vehicle for evaluation, allowing the anchorpersons and journalist panels more freedom to voice concrete views. More specifically, prime-time news is generally cast in terms (...) of two major sub-genres, namely the debate and the structured panel discussion. These sub-genres particularly lend themselves to the performance of acts of evaluation by TV journalists. Far from merely reporting events, journalists unequivocally show that their main task is to jointly interpret reality on behalf of the viewer audience. They set about this task by explicitly encoding their personal attitudes, while directly challenging government spokespersons and policies. It is argued that, in so doing, media personalities in effect shape audience opinions. The data attest to the increasing empowerment of the Greek media, and illustrate the ways in which conversational processes bring into being the continuously evolving public sphere in contemporary Greece. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I approach the political and philosophical similarities and differences between late eighteenth-century thinkers John Thelwall and William Godwin from the point of view of their respective choices for the genre of political communication. I approach their thought and its expression by weaving an interpretation of what they were saying with a reflection on how and to whom they were speaking. This, I contend, helps us clarify further the thought of each thinker and track the changes in (...) their conception of equality in the framework of political communication. As the 1790s unfolded, both thinkers, I argue, tried to diversify their audience, be generally more inclusive, and re-think the hierarchies of relationship between authors/speakers and their audience in their political communication. Nevertheless, they did so asymmetrically and in different ways: Thelwall quickly started tapping into popular culture, especially oral culture, while Godwin chose the modes of fiction and the conversational essay. By making these choices, both authors enacted a different understanding and practice of political education, and political equality. (shrink)

B. L. Ware and Wil Linkugel (1973) identified apologia as a rhetorical genre. Ever since, argumentation scholars have spent an enormous energy analyzing speeches of self-defense as well as public relations efforts to deny charges. Much less attention has been accorded to the act that prompts such contention, accusation. Argumentation in Political Interviews takes up a special case: discussions between journalists and politicians where charges of inconsistency arise and are uttered, disputed, and dispatched. The practice is common. The stakes (...) are high. “Flip-flopping” is an undesirable term for a politician who cannot get his thinking straight. Thus, journalists prize catching up a politician in contradictions; politicians wish to escape the clutches of contradiction and to appear reasonable.Corina Andone explains the dialectical structures and the rhetorical contexts for contemporary practices in the United Kingdom.Argumentation in Political Interviews extends pragma-dialectics general. (shrink)

This collection of original essays brings a dramatically different perspective to bear on the contemporary "crisis of journalism." Rather than seeing technological and economic change as the primary causes of current anxieties, The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered draws attention to the role played by the cultural commitments of journalism itself. Linking these professional ethics to the democratic aspirations of the broader societies in which journalists ply their craft, it examines how the new technologies are being shaped to (...) sustain value commitments rather than undermining them. Recent technological change and the economic upheaval it has produced are coded by social meanings. It is this cultural framework that actually transforms these "objective" changes into a crisis. The book argues that cultural codes not only trigger sharp anxiety about technological and economic changes, but provide pathways to control them, so that the democratic practices of independent journalism can be sustained in new forms. (shrink)