Modernism and the Esthetics of Personal Computing

This paper is a contribution to the study of the esthetics of personal computing. The personal computer (PC) is shaped by ideas, including esthetic values, which it in turn carries into the broader social and cultural context where it is used. Until the early 1990s, this context was limited to a minority subculture who enjoyed interaction with the machine through the medium of learnt “command lines” in arcane computer languages. In the past decade, however, the PC has become more overtly estheticized – a source of multi-medic sensation and apparent personal empowerment – as it has moved into the cultural mainstream. The rise of the seductive “user-friendly” interface has led some to speculate that the PC is a “postmodern” cultural phenomenon, stimulating relativist and anti-realist lines of self-reflection on the part of its users. The paper accepts that the PC has acted as a catalyst for cultural change, raising the profile of some esthetic values and creating awareness of new principles that may be relevant to the esthetics of the future. In place of the idea that this development is “postmodern”, however, the modernist esthetic values of openness to interpretation, challenging audiences to participate in the construction of esthetic effects, and simultaneity as key organizing principle of the work, are put forward as alternative design principles for PC interfaces. It is suggested that application of these principles might produce artefacts that comport better with the ideal of an enlightened autonomous citizenry than do current design standards.     

Ukrainian Symbolism and the Problem of Modernism

This article explores the role of children’s literature in the formation of Stalinist identity and assembles a list of moral principles developed in the most popular early works of Arkadii Gaidar. It is not in Marxist texts nor in Pioneer slogans, but in these simple stories that the essential narrative structures of Soviet morality were created. Gaidar’s books are representative of a whole group of Soviet children’s literary classics published in the late 1920s–early 1930s and written by young people whose coming of age coincided with the years of political and social turmoil. This study argues that Gaidar’s own personal experiences as a youthful Red Army commander during the Civil War underpinned the moral vision of these popular novels. A new military-like value system, with courage (not kindness or love) as its central value, originated in Gaidar’s books and moulded several generations of Soviet children.     

Moscow Architecture between Stalinism and Modernism

Recent changes in Moscow's urban structure combine the post-Soviet and the early Soviet aesthetical and ideological patterns in a very contradictory way. The master plan of 2004 with its vision of the ‘‘new capital’’ of the year 2020, is essentially orientated along the lines of its 1935 predecessor. Striking similarity of the mechanisms of the visual celebration of Moscow as a capital city of Russian Federation is, however, based on the opposite economies. The goals of a representative architecture in Moscow are being intertwined with the demands of a new economic settings for architectural planning. The choice of architecture from the 1930s and 1950s as a pattern of orientation for some buildings planned for the most prominent spaces in Moscow is seen here as an oscillation between traditionalism and modernism, considered in the context of political discourses and urban policy.     

Modernism,the City and the “Domestic Interior”

This article argues that the overwhelming critical and historical focus on the figure of the flâneur in readings of literary modernism has led to the marginalization of key aspects of the experience of living and writing in the modern city: the marginalization, in fact, of the domestic interior. Having situated the reasons for the dominance of this critical paradigm, the article then explores whether we might be able to generate a comparably historicized cultural project, based on readings of Woolf, of Richardson, and of Pound and his circle, that engages with the more confined, and the more static terrain of the room as a way of reading the modern city. It analyzes some of modernism's key interiors, beginning with rooms in a number of Virginia Woolf's texts, and considering how they figure as a space of memory, as a framework for identities, and as a locus of security. It then examines the hierarchies of domestic spaces, the relations between the boundaries of the self and the boundaries of the room, and the troubling landscape of the suburban in Dorothy Richardson's novel Pilgrimage. Finally, in examining the cultural milieu of Ezra Pound, it considers how London interiors provide the physical and the metaphorical landscape for particular forms of modernist innovation in the early years of the twentieth century.     

略论阿里·沙里亚蒂对伊斯兰现代主义的贡献

阿里·沙里亚蒂是伊斯兰革命三大著名理论家之一和"游击队之父".从伊斯兰现代主义思想史来看,他在继承伊斯兰现代主义思想家阿富汗尼和艾克巴尔改革思想的基础上,吸收了马克思主义和存在主义等西方现代思想,并以此来解读和批判伊斯兰教,对当代伊斯兰现代主义思想家产生了重要启示和影响.本文通过对比沙里亚蒂与伊斯兰现代主义思想家阿富汗尼和艾克巴尔,进而认为,沙里亚蒂是在百余年伊斯兰现代主义思想史上继两者之后最为重要的思想家,他对伊斯兰现代主义作出了多方面贡献.     

Modernism,postmodernism and global standards setting

This paper discusses the key features of modernism and postmodernism, and critiques global standards setting from a postmodern theoretical perspective. The main areas of critique consist of the possibility of the creation of yet another totalizing discourse or grand narrative; debates around the particular and the universal; issues around representation; and power, knowledge and discursive formations. We argue that to treat modernism and postmodernism as a linear progression and as a bi‐polar categorization is to fall within the traps of modernism itself. We have thus avoided making a choice between modernism and postmodernism—between justification, objectivity, reason, universalism, proof and unity of science on the one hand and the postmodern emphases on language, power, and the particular, contingent and relational on the other hand.     

Consulting the Farmer: The Rough and the Smooth

Grass Without Roots — Rural Development under Government Auspices. By L.C. Jain with B.V. Krishnamurthy and P.M. Tripathi. Improving International Irrigation Management with Farmer Participation — Getting the Process Right. By Norman Uphoff.     

Between Modernism and Postmodernism: Lenski's Power and Privilege in the Study of Inequalities

Gerhard Lenski's classical work on stratification Power and Privilege , was an effort to reconcile and to synthesize different approaches to inequality incorporated into the grand theories of the day. It anticipated a variety of developments in the theoretical and empirical understanding of inequalities. These include recognition of the multiplicity of inequalities; emphasis on race, class, gender, and other sources and systems of domination and subordination; and the intersection of these factors in complex patterns to create different standpoints and life consequences. The result was groundbreaking work that underscored the multidimensionality of stratification systems, the variability of their influences, and the notion that their intersection in itself has implications beyond the sum of component parts. In these ways his work foreshadowed the possibilities of finding common ground between modern and postmodern perspectives, to make Lenski the last grand theorist of modernity and a forerunner of postmodern theories of inequality.     

Rural studies: Modernism, postmodernism and the ‘post-rural’

In response to Philo [(1992b), Neglected rural geographies: a review. Journal of Rural Studies8, 193–207), who calls for rural studies to take the study of ‘others’ more seriously, we argue the need to take postmodernism more seriously. The paper focuses upon the production of knowledge about rural areas by academics. In the narrative that we provide here, the ‘rural’ had a strong presence until Pahl's critique of the rural-urban continuum which both diminished the status of the rural and emphasised the role of class in shaping particular spaces. Newby and his colleagues applied class analysis to agriculture, likewise undermining the significance of the rural. Further applications of general social theory, such as the political economy and restructuring approaches, show how modernist rural studies seem to be fighting a losing battle to posit the indispensability of the significance of the urban-rural division as an explanation; articulating and rearticulating the divide within a whole range of processes: economic, social and cultural. Rural social scientists have woven this modernist narrative, but, as Philo shows, one effect has been the neglect of certain social groups, cultures and identities. However, in contrast to Philo, we argue that a rather fundamental reassessment of social scientific approaches to the rural is required if these ‘neglected others’ are to be satisfactorily considered. We believe a ‘sociology of postmodernism’ would offer a more reflexive perspective on the processes which give rise to ‘the rural’. We thus call for an end to the use of universal or global concepts such as ‘rural’ (or the ‘urban’) and for a concern with the way places are ‘made’. This will entail a focus on ‘power’ as certain actors impose ‘their’ rurality on others. We term this the study of the ‘post-rural’.     

Newspaper Construction of a Moral Farmer

Abstract This study examines how six national newspapers balanced supporting agriculture (a morally good occupation) with supporting environ‐mentalism (nature as a moral value), in an area in which agricultural and environmental interests conflict—farm use of pesticides. The study showed that, contrary to expectations, newspapers supported social change (were largely critical of pesticide use and sympathetic to organic agriculture). Farmers were portrayed positively as quiet social movement participants, and newspapers suggested that government and universities were blocking infrastructural change that should be supported. The study contradicts earlier theories of the press and social movements that suggest that newspapers contain, rather than promote, social change.     

Three Forsaken Poets: Significant Absences in Balkan Modernism

ABSTRACT

Narratives dealing with the literary histories of South-Eastern Europe frame the canon of the nineteenth and twentieth century mostly in terms of rebirth, or re-awakening of a national culture. The literary history of Balkan modernisms and the avant-garde proves no exception to this rule. Its history has been often narrowed down to an often implicit monolingual canon with an ‘ethnic’ pedigree. This essay, although critical of these excluding mechanisms, does not propose a deconstruction of the national modernist canon. Instead, it wishes to reflect on alternative models for literary history, with alternative parameters that include figures of transition in terms of (national) language and ethnicity. It draws on three examples: Victor Tausk, Stanislav Vinaver and Monny de Boully.     

试论新生代农民工道德同一性问题

新生代农民工和道德同一性在当下已引起各学科各专家的关注，新生代农民工的社会身份认同和道德自我认同的问题也成为社会学、伦理学的热点问题。新生代农民工的生存困境更体现在精神层面上，企业思想政治教育对于推动和加强新生代农民工的道德教育及道德同一性培育能够发挥积极的作用。目前仍需努力拓展各种途径加强新生代农民工的思想道德及价值观引导并促其向市民转变。     

Becoming a New Farmer: Agrarianism and the Contradictions of Diverse Economies*

A resurgence of agrarianism has motivated new farmers to enter farming, not for profit, but for lifestyle and socio‐ecological values which are frequently associated with diverse economies. Proponents of diverse economies argue for an ontological reframing that accounts for non‐capitalist forms of economic exchange. However, these perspectives have not fully addressed the conditions—often structured by race and class—that facilitate participation in diverse economies. This paper is based on mixed‐methods research on the life cycle of new farmers in Hawai‘i that include participants of farmer training programs. We investigate what drives new farmers into farming, by what mechanisms they are able (or not) to establish a farm, and what limits the duration of their participation. Our analysis reveals three contradictions of diverse economies in agriculture: (1) the inadvertent undervaluation of farmwork that undermines broader efforts to improve the welfare of farm labor; (2) the tension between the value of scaling up and the vulnerability of cooptation; and (3) the ways in which the duration of new farmers' engagement is structured by their ability to mobilize unpaid labor and external resources. These contradictions challenge long‐term and inclusive participation in diverse economies in ways that constrain their emancipatory potential.