Gogol'’s “Portrait” Repainted: On Gary Shteyngart’s “Shylock on the Neva”

The Russian-American novelist Gary Shteyngart has frequently been called a “Gogolian” writer, usually in an attempt to explain the pedigree of his grotesque humour. This article focuses on Shteyngart’s story “Shylock on the Neva” (2002), which is a modern-day rewriting of Gogol'’s tale “Portret” [“The Portrait”]. A close analysis of Shteyngart’s text and comparison to its Gogolian model reveals a complex relation that is not necessarily centered on Gogol'’s humour. In his rewriting of “The Portrait,” Shteyngart emphasizes the inherent venality and vulgarity of Gogol'’s characters, who turn into grotesque caricatures of their prototypes. In doing so, he seems to “Gogolize” Gogol'’s tale by adding some of the absurd humour that critics have found to be lacking in “The Portrait.” By making a painting the focus of their stories, both Gogol' and Shteyngart engage in a self-reflective comment about art and the role of the creative artist. Similar to the clichéd hack-paintings of Gogol'’s painter Chartkov, artistic creation has been reduced in “Shylock on the Neva” to the production of postmodern simulacra based on stereotypes and cultural myths.     

Poetry of the Swamp: Blok’s “Folks” Cycle Bubbles of the Earth

Gogol'’s “A Few Words about Pushkin” has traditionally been viewed as evidence that Gogol' idolized Pushkin as a national poet par excellence. This article argues that behind Gogol'’s deference for Russia’s greatest poet lie layers of polemic and subversive iconoclasm. Though he initially proclaims Pushkin Russia’s national poet, Gogol' goes on to use his trademark rhetorical tools to effectively strip the poet of the honour. In doing so, he attempts to influence the reception of his own writings, which at the time predominantly concerned Ukrainian themes, in ways that would encourage his Russian audience to consider him—and not Pushkin—as Russia’s premier national writer. Countering Pushkin’s Russocentric model of national culture, Gogol' champions instead a centrifugal conception of national-imperial identity that places Russia’s imperial periphery at the center of the “Russian” experience.     

Nikolai Gogol'’s Self-Fashioning in the 1830s: The Postcolonial Perspective

This study examines Gogol'’s complex self-fashioning during the time of the creation and reception of his Ukrainian tales Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki [Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka] (1831–1832) in light of the postcolonial concept of mimicry. Gogol'’s self-fashioning is studied through his submission to the symbolic power responsible for branding him as the Other in imperial Russian culture, as well as through his deliberate strategy of mimicry. Not only did Gogol'’s marginal social status and his Ukrainian ethnicity create a social hierarchy responsible for fashioning him as “an outsider within” imperial culture, Gogol' himself engaged in the colonial mimicry, trying to reverse the colonial gaze that imagined him as a “sly” Ukrainian. Challenging the accepted view of Gogol' as one who internalized the colonial stereotype of a “sly” Ukrainian, this study treats Gogol'’s identity as strategic, positional, and ambivalent. The first part of the study focuses on the manipulation of stereotypes of the Other within the Russian nationalist imagination in the early 1830s; the second part examines Gogol'’s ambivalent visual self-representation and social performance that simultaneously mimicked and menaced the colonial authority.     

A.I. Solzhenitsyn Selected Bibliography December 1962 - October 1970

Critics have noted similarities between Nikolai Gogol'’s three early horror stories (Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala [St. John’s Eve], Strashnaia mest' [A Terrible Vengeance] Vii) and the works of his famous German predecessor Ludwig Tieck. There also exists some speculation concerning the relationship between his Ukrainian tales and the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann. However, a detailed comparison between the two authors focused only on Gogol'’s “St. Petersburg” stories. His early tales have been ignored because they were presumed to depend mostly on folklore. This article argues that there are intertextual connections between Gogol'’s St. John’s Eve and A Terrible Vengeance, and Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann [The Sandman] and Ignaz Denner. The paper contends that Gogol' was recapitulating, consciously or unconsciously, Hoffmann’s oeuvre in his works both in terms of plot detail and on a deeper psychological level.     

Cooling the Mother Out: Revisiting and Revising Goffman's Account

This article revisits Erving Goffman's important yet neglected metaphor of “cooling the mark out.” Drawing on a study of mothers whose child has Down's syndrome, I explore the value of Goffman's work for capturing how mothers interpret their child's diagnosis as a loss and rectify this breach by constructing an acceptance of their new situation. The mothers' accounts highlight how Goffman's contentions can be enriched by acknowledging the gendered, temporal, and public character of a loss. This article, thus, can be read both as a celebration and critical revision of his theoretical contribution.     

Skuka and the Absurd in Gogol'’s Tale of the ‘Two Ivans’

The present article is devoted to an analysis of Gogol'’s last story from his Ukrainian cycle, “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich”; it makes use of canonical as well as innovative approaches to Gogol'’s tale in order to explore the significance of the epilogue to an interpretation of the story as a whole. The examination will encompass ideas on the temporal aspects of the narration, the philosophical concept of ennui/skuka, and the possible significance of the camera obscura as the setting for one of the key moments in the story. Whereas the camera obscura is the setting of the quarrel between the two main characters, the story ends with a manifestation of skuka from the narrator: how do these two elements relate to each other, and what do they suggest in terms of the possibility of reaching an all-encompassing interpretation of the ‘Two Ivans’?     

The Dark Side of “The Nose”: The Paradigms of Olfactory Perception in Gogol'’s “The Nose”

The article focuses on the ways in which Nikolai Gogol'’s famous story “The Nose” can be viewed meaningfully after being designated as the token of nonsense and illogicality by representatives of structuralism and hermeneutics in Slavic studies. Instead of interpreting the story’s symbolic significance or establishing its connections to other texts, the present article examines the story literally and asks what it means to lose one’s olfactory capacity in the Russian capital in the first third of the nineteenth century. The article’s answer is that Gogol'’s story can be seen as marking the moment during which the traditional olfactory-rich values of Russian culture gave way to a more vision-oriented Western sensory paradigm that tended to denigrate the sense of smell and its cognitive potential.     

Capital as the lens that Bourdieu Pierres through: Public relations,social theory,and rhetoric

In this paper, I explore the limitations of Bourdieu’s “capital” with the help of Burke’s four master tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Both Bourdieu and Burke were concerned with theoretical reductionism. I claim that Bourdieu could not help but be reductive insofar as his metaphor of capital became the totalizing lens through which he understood society. First, I review Bourdieu’s forms of capital, noting how capital serves as the sine qua non of his theory of practice. Second, I situate Bourdieu within the PR literature. Third, I read Bourdieu’s “capital” through Burke’s (1941) four master tropes. Reading Bourdieu through Burke enables PR scholars to better understand the limitations in Bourdieu’s terminology, which leads to debunking, materialist reductionism, and relativism. I conclude with implications for future research adopting Bourdieusian and Burkean approaches to public relations.     

Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale: a unique social engagement

Abstract

Art as a social engagement in the West can be dated back to the history of avant-garde art starting from the end of nineteenth century. Rooted in his own cultural background, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s socially engaged art project “Fairytale is more complex than the avant-garde strategy. The work Fairytale established a structure – “1=1,001”. That means on the one hand, the participants can be easily regarded everywhere in Kassel as 1,001 mobile works of art. All of them contribute to an entire work. In other words, the 1,001 people consist of one work. On the other hand, everyone is dealing with their personal issues independent of art. In this sense, the entire work can be divided into 1,001 personal experiences. This structure is based on three principles of Chinese philosophy Taoism – the duality between Yin and Yang, the dynamism between Yin and Yang, and the concept of “uselessness”. Positioning Fairytale within both Western theoretical as well as Chinese philosophical contexts, this essay is to analyze how Chinese philosophy shaped Ai’s strategy of social engagement and his cultural identity – Chineseness.     

Exegetical Explorations: Parsons’ Theoretical Faith and Hope in Structural Functional Analysis

This article discusses Talcott Parsons scientific world-view and how his theory gave expression to his more-than-merely theoretical reliance upon insights he gleaned from Whitehead and Weber. He developed “social systems theory” not only with a structural-functional and evolutionary understanding of social action but also saw science, in these terms as well. The article seeks to trace his theory’s reliance upon the system concept which gave his work a persistent focus throughout his scholarly career.     

Exegetical explorations: Parsons’ problematic aim

The aim of this article is to encourage ongoing and close exegetical study of sociology’s theoretical texts. Attention is drawn to two instances where Talcott Parsons’ theory project seems to be at odds with itself. Both are related to his “first major synthesis” The Structure of Social Action (1937). The first concerns Parsons’ opening discussion of Crane Brinton’s question “Who now reads Spencer?” Parsons’ discussion of Spencer is examined and then compared and contrasted with what he later wrote in the “Introduction” to the 1961 reprint of Spencer’s The Study of Sociology. The second concerns Parsons’ problematic view of his contribution to social theory’s “secondary literature” and how this relates to his claims about “convergence.” The article notes that Parsons was trying to identify what he believed to be a new norm for social theory. Sociological theory, he believed, would from henceforth have to be formulated in terms of this newly emerging normative frame of reference.     

Site-Writing: She is Walking about in a Town Which She does not Know

ABSTRACT

Recently my writing has explored the position of the author, not only in relation to theoretical ideas, art objects, and architectural spaces but also to the site of writing itself. This interest has evolved into a project of “site-writing” that aims to spatialize criticism. “Site-writing” occurs when discussions concerning site specificity extend to involve art criticism, and the spatial qualities of writing and reading become as important in conveying meaning as the content of the criticism. This article suggests that this kind of criticism or critical spatial writing, in operating as mode of a practice in its own right, questions the terms of reference that relate the critic to the work positioned “under” critique. This is an active writing that constructs as well as traces the sites of relation between critic and work. Outlining the conceptual concerns that frame my project of “site-writing” with particular reference to current debates in art criticism, this article then draws on psychoanalytic theory to think through relationships between the spatial politics of internal psychical figures and external cultural geographies, drawing in particular on the work of psychoanalytic practitioners and theorists Jessica Benjamin and Jean Laplanche. Then, in “She is Walking about in a Town Which She Does Not Know,” this article demonstrates the practice of “site-writing” through an essay located on threshold spaces both real and fictional, exterior and interior which link and separate the critic from the work of the eight women artists included in Elles sont passées par ici, Loguivy de la Mer, Brittany, France, 2005.     

Painting in a Different Kind of Void

The reception of Forrest Bess's work has primarily portrayed the artist as a “visionary” without external influence. By doing this, critics have downplayed the historical and cultural moment of Bess's productions and, subsequently, the well-developed interpretive models available from the history of art. This essay positions Bess and his work within the New York School of painting and its critical discourses of gendered metaphors and heteronormative formal evaluation. Recognizing how the artist participated in the conventions of vanguard painting of this time period offers new insights into Bess's singular style. Bess's works reveal the blind spots created by the visual grammar of Abstract Expressionism in his attempts to figure his repressed same-sex desires.     

The Dark Side of Art’s Social Turn: Towards a Discourse on the Impact of Art’s Use of Social Forms Upon the Social

The recent “social turn” in art, in which art favours using forms from social life above its own, has been extensively discussed. Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, Conversation Pieces and The One and the Many by Grant Kester, essays by Claire Bishop who supplies the term “the Social Turn,” and her recent publication Artificial Hells, are now as important to the field as the art they scrutinise. Ironically, however, when this discussion regards the implications of the “turn”, it habitually addresses the effects of this development from – and for – art’s point of view, overlooking the way in which artists’ inroads into social life may be differently regarded in the social realm. As much as this represents a failure to illuminate a particular area for knowledge, it also signifies a failure to take art’s revalorised commitment to the social to its ethical conclusion: such, from two perspectives, is the “dark side” of art’s social turn. This article seeks to mitigate these oversights. In particular, it looks at art in which an artist undertakes another person’s professional work. Considering the effects of this on those whose practices are appropriated, I propose a consultative approach, involving ethnographic and empathetic modes of address. Consequently, this article does not present an answer to the question it poses, “how do professionals in the social realm see art’s appropriations of their practices?” but rather, a framework for approaching that.     

Vygotsky's Stage Theory: The Psychology of Art and the Actor under the Direction of Perezhivanie

This article reviews Vygotsky's writings on arts (particularly logocentric art including the theater) and emotions, drawing on his initial exploration in The Psychology of Art and his final considerations set forth in a set of essays, treatises, and lectures produced in the last years of his life. The review of The Psychology of Art includes attention to the limits of his analysis, the mixed Marxist legacy that is evident in the book, the cultural blinders that affect his vision of the relative value of different artistic productions, the content of what he elsewhere refers to his “tedious investigations” into extant views, and the gist of what he considers to be the essence of art. Attention to his late work falls into two areas: Emotion in formal drama and emotion in everyday drama, each of which involves perezhivanie, roughly but incompletely characterized as emotional experience. The article concludes with an effort to situate Vygotsky's writing on art and emotion both within his broader effort to articulate a comprehensive developmental psychology of socially, culturally, and historically grounded individuals and social groups, and within scholarship that has extended and questioned his work as his influence has expanded beyond the clinics of Soviet Moscow.     

Ungrateful slaves? An examination of job quality and job satisfaction for male part-time workers in the UK

Research on part-time work has concentrated over many decades on the experiences of women but male part-time employment is growing in the UK. This article addresses two sizable gaps in knowledge concerning male part-timers: are men's part-time jobs of lower quality than men's full-time jobs? Are male part-timers more or less job-satisfied compared to their full-time peers? A fundamental part of both interrogations is whether men's part-time employment varies by occupational class. The article is motivated by the large body of work on female part-timers. Its theoretical framework is rooted in one of the most controversial discussions in the sociology of women workers: the “grateful slave” debate that emerged in the 1990s when researchers sought to explain why so many women expressed job satisfaction with low-quality part-time jobs. Innovatively, this article draws upon those contentious ideas to provide new insights into male, rather than female, part-time employment. Based upon analysis of a large quantitative data set, the results provide clear evidence of low-quality male part-time employment in the UK, when compared with men's full-time jobs. Men working part-time also express deteriorating satisfaction with jobs overall and in several specific dimensions of their jobs. Male part-timers in lower occupational class positions retain a clear “lead” both in bad job quality and low satisfaction. The article asks whether decreasingly satisfied male part-time workers should be termed “ungrateful slaves?” It unpacks the “grateful slave” metaphor and, after doing so, rejects its value for the ongoing analysis of part-time jobs in the formal labor market.     

The Meaning of Queer Home

Abstract

This article positions two proto-queer texts together in order to demonstrate how the development of American “queer subjectivity” arose as a discernible discursive and embodied notion related to “home.” Written before the arrival of the queer category, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (The Crossing Press, Freedom, CA, 1982) and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (Alyson Press, Los Angeles, CA, 2003, original work published 1993) concentrate upon the home as a site conditioned by twin concerns that would become central to queer politics: “the home” as narrative metaphor and homes as real-world shelters. Queering the home stretches and scrambles the home category (“dyke bar as home,” “Black lesbian sisterhood as home,” “body as home”) while insisting upon self-defined, material structures of protection and comfort for queers. The article performs a “reading through skin” of queer scholarship and of sociological data. It argues that these queer-emergent texts helped establish notions of “queer home” via exploring metaphoric and empirical axes related to domestic space.     

The Sociological Insight of W.E.B. Du Bois

W.E.B. Du Bois discussed key aspects of the new field of sociology in his early writings. This article presents Du Bois’ conception of the developing field and his sociological perspective based on nine of his key original sociological writings. Rather than generating theoretical formulations and studying abstract concepts, Du Bois insisted that sociology be an empirical science adhering to the methods utilized by the physical sciences. Sociology's major objectives are to study the “deeds of men” and to provide a science of human action. Sociological research seeks the discovery of “truth” which can form the basis of social policy. Noting that the regularity of human behavior is evidence of laws and acknowledging that human behavior is also subject to chance factors, sociology must seek to determine the limits of each. Du Bois’ research methods, based on methodological triangulation, were formulated to provide the “truths” which he eagerly sought. Du Bois was convinced that these truths were worth knowing and that sociology had the promise of becoming one of the “greatest sciences.” Attention directed toward Du Bois’ key sociological writings within sociology curricula will introduce current and future readers to the groundbreaking sociological work of the pioneer sociologist.     

Sociological Knowledge of the Other: Wolff’s “Surrender and Catch” Methodology

From a sociological perspective the “surrender and catch” expression derives, of course, from the experiential and existential basis of Wolff’s epistemology and hermeneutics.“Surrender” is connected with phenomenology, and Husserl’s (as well as Schütz’s) writings, besides Scheler’s idea of a “relatively natural world view”.“Surrender and catch” is also a “sociology of understanding” a definition which recuperates the German verstehende Soziologie though it makes a distinction between “surrender” and “surrender to”. It is not just a theory, it is a methodology too, in order to understand the otherness.Wolff was a multi-facetted scholar and this affected his conceptualizations. Furthermore, his surrender is something one experiences existentially in a number of fields, from the nature of empirical research to the art of theoretical reflection, from politics to poetry, from philosophy to history to sociology.It must also be pointed out that surrender and catch are a form of protest against the status quo.     

Telling Others How You Live—Refining Goffman's Stigma Theory Through an Analysis of Housing Strugglers in a Homeowner Nation

This article revisits Goffman's stigma theory from the perspective of housing studies. We elaborate on Goffman's approach by exploring how housing tenure can work as a proxy for moral character. We interviewed twenty‐seven people who are excluded from access to homeownership in two cities in Norway, which is a “homeowner nation.” These individuals are unable to enter the dominant “homeowner class” for different reasons, including drug‐dependency, mental illness, refugee background, low socioeconomic status; thus, they must access housing through other tenures; private renting or social housing. To many of them, housing becomes a stigma, in Goffman terms, an “undesired differentness.” Social housing is known to carry stigma in Norway. It was thus a paradox, that those with the softest differentness—private rental—were most likely to practice (Goffman:) “information control” over their housing situation. Goffman's theoretical apparatus, and his distinction between the discreditable and the discredited in particular, helped us make this paradox comprehensible. Through this analysis, refinements to Goffman's theory were discovered. We suggest that “multiple stigmas,” which was not seen clearly by Goffman himself, should be a key notion in stigma studies. We use this notion to distinguish between possible sub‐types to the discredited‐discreditable distinction.