Culture Wars Universities And The Political Unconscious

This book argues that whenever we are talking about cancel culture, identity politics, political correctness, antisemitism, conspiracy theories, or the alt-Right, we are dealing with a culture war, which often pits two sides against each other in a split world of good and evil. These political representations rely on a set of unconscious processes best understand through psychoanalysis. As this book argues, if you want to comprehend the rhetoric of the Right, the Left, conservatives, and centrists, it is necessary to see how these ideologies rely on unacknowledged defense mechanisms, fantasies, fears, and desires. In fact, if we do not employ psychoanalytic concepts to examine our political investments, we will be unable to get to the root causes driving these social productions. Each chapter of this book looks at a specific writer‘s or politician’s take on contemporary culture wars. One of the reoccurring themes concerns the way free speech has been weaponized by different ideological formations, and this battle over free expression is often centered on the role that universities play in balancing the demands among competing social interests. This book will not only clarify what universities should be, but it will also help us to move beyond our polarized political world.

Living Genres in Late Modernity rehears the American 1970s through the workings of its musical genres. Exploring stylistic developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, including soul, funk, disco, pop, the nocturne, and the concerto, Charles Kronengold treats genres as unstable constellations of works, people, practices, institutions, technologies, money, conventions, forms, ideas, and multisensory experiences. What these genres share is a significant cultural moment: they arrive just after “the sixties” and are haunted by a sense of belatedness, loss, or doubt, even as they embrace narratives of progress or abundance. These genres give us reasons—and means—to examine our culture’s self-understandings. Through close readings and large-scale mappings of cultural and stylistic patterns, the book’s five linked studies reveal how genres help construct personal and cultural identities that are both partial and overlapping, that exist in tension with one another, and that we experience in ebbs and flows.

This text provides a framework for understanding higher education in the US and other western countries since the 1970s whereby the logic of the market place has increasingly come to dominate all arenas and, in context, the education system. The author calls this process "commodification" and he describes the transformation of universities in the US and elsewhere as they attempt to accomodate the enforced changes on their academic lives and those of their students.; The book chronicles changes with the increasing focus on career and the movement towards the instrumental functions of education; the financial crisis and the development of a more corporate approach to education; of consumption that produce universities heavy with expensive, well-equipped and powerful administrations and decreasing numbers of ever more disenfranchised faculty.

A major contribution to the growing debate on culture and politics. Assured, fair-minded and constantly stimulating, this book will be widely read by all those interested in the subject of culture.

This book showcases recent work about reading and books in sociology and the humanities across the globe. From different standpoints and within the broad perspectives within the cultural sociology of reading, the eighteen chapters examine a range of reading practices, genres, types of texts, and reading spaces. They cover the Anglophone area of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia; the transnational, multilingual space constituted by the readership of the Colombian novel One Hundred Years of Solitude; nineteenth-century Chile; twentieth-century Czech Republic; twentieth century Swahili readings in East Africa; contemporary Iran; and China during the cultural revolution and the post-Mao period. The chapters contribute to current debates about the valuation of literature and the role of cultural intermediaries; the iconic properties of textual objects and of the practice of reading itself; how reading supports personal, social and political reflection; bookstores as spaces for sociability and the interplay of high and commercial cultures; the political uses of reading for nation-building and propaganda, and the dangers and gratifications of reading under repression. In line with the cultural sociology of reading’s focus on meaning, materiality and emotion, this book explores the existential, ethical and political consequences of reading in specific locations and historical moments.

Cinema Wars explores the intersection of film, politics, and US culture and society through a bold critical analysis of the films, TV shows, and documentaries produced in the early 2000s Offers a thought-provoking depiction of Hollywood film as a contested terrain between conservative and liberal forces Films and documentaries discussed include: Black Hawk Down, The Dark Knight, Star Wars, Syriana, WALL-E, Fahrenheit 9/11 and other Michael Moore documentaries, amongst others Explores how some films in this era supported the Bush-Cheney regime, while others criticized the administration, openly or otherwise Investigates Hollywood’s treatment of a range of hot topics, from terrorism and environmental crisis to the Iraq war and the culture wars of the 2000s Shows how Hollywood film in the 2000s brought to life a vibrant array of social protest and helped create cultural conditions to elect Barack Obama

Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement or auxiliary to other methods current today. Jameson supports his thesis by looking closely at the nature of interpretation. Our understanding, he says, is colored by the concepts and categories that we inherit from our culture's interpretive tradition and that we use to comprehend what we read. How then can the literature of other ages be understood by readers from a present that is culturally so different from the past? Marxism lies at the foundation of Jameson's answer, because it conceives of history as a single collective narrative that links past and present; Marxist literary criticism reveals the unity of that uninterrupted narrative. Jameson applies his interpretive theory to nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, including the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. Throughout, he considers other interpretive approaches to the works he discusses, assessing the importance and limitations of methods as different as Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, dialectical analysis, and allegorical readings. The book as a whole raises directly issues that have been only implicit in Jameson's earlier work, namely the relationship between dialectics and structuralism, and the tension between the German and the French aesthetic traditions.