The Warrior Women of Islam: Female Empowerment in Arabic Popular Literature. By Remke Kruk. London: I. B. Tauris, 2014. Pp. xxv + 272. £62 ; £15.99.

Recently, scientific and popular press articles have begun to represent sex as a health-promoting activity. A number of scientific studies have identified possible health benefits of sexual activity, including increased lifespan and decreased risk of certain types of cancers. These scientific findings have been widely reported on in the popular press. This "sex for health" discourse claims that sexual activity leads to quantifiable physical and mental health benefits in areas not directly related to sexuality. Analyzing this discourse provides (...) an opportunity to better understand both broader health promotion discourses and current norms and anxieties about sexuality. In this article, I place this "sex for health" discourse within the context of broader health promotion discourses and within the context of a number of historical and contemporary discourses connecting health and sexuality. I argue that although the "sex for health" discourse may serve to de-stigmatize sexual activity for some, it may also increase pressure on others to be sexually active and may further pathologize sexual "dysfunction." In addition, these representations often serve to further privilege a normative form of sexual behavior - coitus in the context of a monogamous heterosexual partnership - at the expense of non-normative sexual desires, identities, and practices. (shrink)

Novel Medicine: Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China. By Andrew Schonebaum. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Pp. viii + 283. $50.

Efforts to diffuse useful knowledge on the part of dedicated social reformers, enterprising publishers, and vigorous voluntary associations created new forms of popular literature in the urban centres of Paris and London during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Popular science periodicals, especially, embodied the aims of the advocates of cheap literature, by providing ‘improving’ information at prices low enough to reach readers who might otherwise purchase potentially dangerous political tracts. Besides promoting social stability, (...) class='Hi'>popular science periodicals served to answer the needs of diverse increasingly literate, leisured, and well paid social groups.From their inception, through their evolution over half a century, periodicals in London and Paris mirrored these similar commitments and concerns of their creators. Continuous imitation back and forth across the Channel indicated just how closely English and French editors shared common programmes. Yet despite the similar aspirations of their promoters, popular science periodicals in England and France revealed the outlines of two very different low scientific cultures, shaped by the dissimilar characteristics of their audiences, editors, and high scientific communities. (shrink)

Recent research into cultural transmission suggests that humans are disposed to learn, remember, and transmit certain types of information more easily than others, and that any information that is passed between people will be subjected to cognitive selective pressures that alter the content and structure so as to make it maximally transmittable. This paper presents a review of emerging research on content biases in cultural evolution with relevance to the transmission of popular narratives. This is illustrated with content analysis (...) of urban legends, which found that most exploited at least one known content bias, with emotional information and social information being the most frequent. We argue that the narratives do not succeed because of the transmission of adaptively relevant information but because of their exploitation of content biases in human cognition. (shrink)

The squatting movement is a social movement that seeks to use unoccupied land or temporarily or permanently abandoned buildings as farmland, housing, meeting places, or centers for social and cultural purposes. Its main motivation is to denounce and at the same time respond to the economic difficulties that activists believe exist to realize the right to housing. Much of what we know about this movement comes from the informational and journalistic literature generated by actors that are close or even (...) belong to the movement. However, there is also a significant diversity of knowledge and scientific evidence on the squatters’ movement that is being produced by academia and that is worth knowing and grouping together. With the aim of defining and understanding how the squatters’ movement is constituted and organized, and how it acts, this research analyzes what the scientific literature affirms about it. Through qualitative research based on the systematic literature review method, information was sought in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The initial universe of 262 articles was finally reduced to a sample of 32 articles. These have been analyzed by means of a categorized classification content analysis. The results obtained allow us to establish the state of the art on the squatting movement, placing special emphasis on its dynamics of resistance, its process of political subjectivation and its mechanisms of action and self-management. The study suggests that the movement is understood based on collective actions with a political role of resistance to neoliberalism and the inequalities it generates, and of response to the basic and social needs of the communities through self-management.Systematic review registration[doi: 10.5281/zenodo.7179670], identifier [7179670]. (shrink)

In this article we take the use of examples as a means to explore the processes of persuasion and consensus-construction involved in the legitimation of popular management knowledge. Examples, as concrete instances or events used to substantiate a wider argument, have been variedly regarded in different research traditions. Classical logic and rhetoric have considered them an inferior form of argument, useful for pedagogic or public debate but inadequate for higher forms of thought. This spirit still permeates much psychological research (...) on communication, where the great persuasive import of examples has been contrasted with more scientific and formal resources for argumentation. Considered in this light, the contingent and episodic nature of examples seems to make them cognitively inferior to explicit statements of general rules. However, various strands of research on the nature of scientific knowledge have shown that implicit forms of knowledge are an integral part of scientific expertise. Examples may thus be more central to disciplinary thought than the conventional normative view seems to allow. In this spirit, we explore the use of examples in a hotly contested field, that of popular discourse on business and management. The profusion of examples in this kind of writing has been often noted, and almost as often criticized. We seek to explore more fully how these examples are deployed, examining the discursive devices that mark examples within the development of the text, their function as rhetorical moves, and their role in presenting arguments that are never otherwise made explicit. (shrink)

These essays showcase the value of the narrative arts in investigating complex conflicts of value in moral and political life, and explore the philosophical problem of moral dilemmas as expressed in ancient drama, classic and contemporary novels, television, film, and popular fiction. From Aeschylus to Deadwood, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Harry Potter, the authors show how the narrative arts provide some of our most valuable instruments for complex and sensitive moral inquiry.

The Man of Wiles in Popular Arabic Literature: A Study of a Medieval Arab Hero. By Malcolm C. Lyons. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 254. $105.

The avant-garde has been popular for some time, but its popularity has tended to fly under the radar. This ¿popular avant-garde,¿ conceived as the meeting ground of the avant-garde and popular, avoids the divorce of art and praxis of which the avant-garde has been accused. The Popular Avant-Garde takes stock of the debates about both the ¿historical¿ (¿modernist¿) and posterior avant-gardes, and sets them in relation to popular culture and art forms. With a critical introduction (...) that examines the concepts of ¿the avant-garde,¿ ¿the popular,¿ and ¿the popular avant-garde,¿ the series of essays analyzes the way in which the avant-garde employs popular genres for political purposes, as well as how the popular acquires a critical function with respect to the avant-garde. Each of the volume¿s three sections considers a different aspect of the productive exchange between the avant-garde and popular: the popular avant-garde as a culturally hybrid and cross-border phenomenon; the play between the popular avant-garde and developments in media and technology; and the popular avant-garde¿s upending of conventional ideas about ¿the people¿ and ¿the popular.¿ The Popular Avant-Garde takes a fresh look at the now canonical Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist movements from the perspectives of gender and sexuality, and cultural and critical theory, while at the same time exploring less well-known avant-garde work in literature, film, television, music, photography, dance, sculpture, and the graphic arts. This volume¿s coverage of the American and Afro-American, Luso-Brazilian and Latin-American, East-European, and Scandinavian avant-gardes, in addition to the vanguards of Spain and other parts of Western Europe, will appeal to all those interested in avant-garde and popular art forms. (shrink)

A study of selected popular literature on Spinoza for the Blackwell Companion to Spinoza.

Habermas’ theory of popular sovereignty has received comparatively little sustained critical attention in the Anglo-American literature since initial responses to Between Facts and Norms. In light of subsequent work on group agency, this paper argues that Habermas’ reconstruction of popular sovereignty—in its denial of the normative force of collective citizen action—is best understood as a renunciation of the doctrine. The paper is structured in three sections. Section 1 examines Habermas’ treatment of popular sovereignty prior to Between (...) Facts and Norms as both (i) a principle of constitutional legitimacy or normative justification for the modern Rechtsstaat and (ii) a concept of legitimation for the rule of the ascendant liberal bourgeoisie. Section 2 then argues that Habermas’ reconstruction of popular sovereignty in Between Facts and Norms, by discounting the role of collective citizen agency in the justification of the modern constitutional state, empties the doctrine of its core normative content. The final section briefly elaborates on this claim by reference to Habermas’ theory of the public sphere. (shrink)

These essays showcase the value of the narrative arts in investigating complex conflicts of value in moral and political life, and explore the philosophical problem of moral dilemmas as expressed in ancient drama, classic and contemporary ...

This paper contributes to the Business Ethics literature by unpacking the multimodal construction of moral narratives in popular culture and its portrayals of organizations and organizational roles. Understanding such portrayals and their construction is crucial to Business Ethics scholarship because they shape organizational imaginaries, influencing understandings and expectations of the ethical/moral responsibilities of organizations and the actors within them. In particular, we study the construction of moral narratives within a reality TV show that focuses on immigration and border (...) control at an airport. We find that the immigration officers are depicted as rational and heroic figures whilst the travellers are presented as emotional and potentially dangerous characters. Our analysis highlights how this is achieved via five multimodal editing dimensions—the structure of interactional scenes, the ability to address the camera, the narrator’s comments, the visual and music effects—that are key in constructing clearly defined personae. We show how, through the intersubjective construction of clear-cut characters, the show downplays the moral complexity of its content. Portraying immigration officers as heroic, while presenting travellers as potentially dangerous, allows for a silencing of any ethical questioning of immigration officers’ organizational practices. (shrink)

Although democracy is in principle associated with popular rule, in practice it is best described as rule by elected elites. This form of government is not only wanting from a theoretical point of view, but it also no longer seems to meet the expectations of large segments of the citizenry. This book offers a blueprint for an alternative democratic model, democracy as popular sovereignty. Starting with the idea that the people, generously defined, are sovereign when they rule as (...) equally valuable and fully participating members of a self-governing collectivity, this model tries to describe the constitutional and institutional arrangements necessary to achieve a workable version of this idea in advanced democratic states. This implies among other changes a greater dose of direct democracy, the use of sortition and a different conception of representation. The overall argument developed combines insights, facts, and findings from normative political theory, empirical political science, democracy’s long history as well as from the recent burgeoning literature on participatory and deliberative democracy. (shrink)

The success of popular women's fiction requires a mode of analysis that is able to reveal the patterns across this category in order to better understand the appeal of these books. Popular fiction, like chick-lit, can be contradictorily framed as simultaneously constituting one, as well as many genres, if a genre is the codification of discursive properties. It may consist of romances, thrillers, romantic suspense and so forth in terms of its discursive properties, but popular women's fiction (...) will also have a pattern of similarity that cuts across these forms – that similarity, I will suggest, lies in the idea of pleasure as a genre of affect that ties various popular fictions together, thereby acting as a type of imperial genre. Pleasure is so ubiquitous and so diverse across the multiple forms that constitute popular women's fiction that I argue it has become a genre in itself. This is, however, not a genre that limits itself to one particular stylistic form, but rather, as a dynamic social construct, it has become a genre of affect that invokes feelings of pleasure. Nthikeng Mohlele's most recent novel, Pleasure, exemplifies the applicability and plasticity of the concept of pleasure, allowing me to examine this work as a type of fictionalised theory which I then apply to South African chick-lit texts: the Trinity series by Fiona Snyckers and Happiness Is a Four-Letter Word by Cynthia Jele. Mohiele's expansive theorisation of pleasure is inherently local in that it is depicted at the level of experience and imagination; yet it is simultaneously macro and global in the connections made to deeply political circuits of identity-based oppressions and structural inequalities. Mohlele reveals the mobility of pleasure as a genre that offers an opportunity to think through the circuits that connect popular fiction through the lens of African literature. (shrink)

The law within each legal system is a function of the practices of some social group. In short, law is a kind of socially grounded norm. H.L.A Hart famously developed this view in his book, The Concept of Law, by arguing that law derives from a social rule, the so-called “rule of recognition.” But the proposition that social facts play a foundational role in producing law is a point of consensus for all modern jurisprudents in the Anglo-American tradition: not just (...) Hart and his followers in the positivist school, most prominently Joseph Raz and Jules Coleman, but also the anti-positivist Ronald Dworkin, who argues that law necessarily synthesizes moral considerations with social facts. But which group’s practices ground each legal system? In particular, which group’s practices undergird U.S. law? Positivists since Hart have universally pointed to either officials or judges as the “recognitional community” (my term): the group such that its rules, conventions, cooperative activities, or practices in some other sense are the social facts from which the law of a given legal system derives. So Hart and all other positivists would identify either U.S. officials or U.S. judges as the recognitional community for U.S. law. This Article grapples with the tension between the positivist’s official- or judge-centered account of the recognitional community and the “popular constitutionalism” now so widely defended by constitutional scholars such as Larry Kramer, Robert Post, Reva Siegel, Mark Tushnet, Jeremy Waldron, and many others. Surely the popular constitutionalist would want to claim that U.S. citizens, not judges or officials, are the recognitional community for U.S. law. I term this position “deep popular constitutionalism.” Indeed, it turns out that Dworkin’s account of law, in its ambition to generate associative moral obligations for the citizenry as a whole, implies deep popular constitutionalism. Here there is a disagreement, hitherto unnoticed, between Dworkin and the positivists. My solution to this disagreement – to the debate between deep popular constitutionalists and deep official or judicial supremacists -- is to dissolve it by providing a group-relative account of law. Social norms, such as norms of dress or eating, are clearly group-relative. A particular dressing or eating behavior may be socially appropriate relative to one group’s norms, yet socially inappropriate relative to another’s. This Article extends the group-relative view from social norms to law itself, with a particular focus on U.S. law and constitutionalism. Part I surveys the jurisprudential literature. It shows how Hart and successor positivists identify the rule of recognition as a social practice engaged in by officials or some subset of officials (judges), rather than citizens generally, and argues that Dworkin by contrast sees the citizenry as a whole as his recognitional community. Parts II and III defend a group-relative account of law. Part II argues, with reference to the U.S. experience, that multiple groups can simultaneously instantiate the kind of social fact that undergirds law, be it a convention, a social norm, a “shared cooperative activity” (SCA), or something else. At many points in U.S. constitutional history, multiple official or citizen groups, defined along departmental, partisan, regional, state-federal, religious, or other lines, have accepted competing rules of recognition for U.S. law. Part III argues that “law” functions, primarily, as either an explanatory or a normative construct, and that insisting on a single recognitional community for each legal system would be arbitrary, both for explanatory purposes and for normative purposes. Part IV considers the many implications of the group-relative account for U.S. constitutional theory – in particular, for popular constitutionalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In what ways can the study of science and popular culture in the American context contribute to ongoing debates on popularization and popular science? This essay suggests that, for several reasons, attention to the antebellum era offers the most significant opportunity to realize more sophisticated understandings of science in American popular culture. First, it enables us to take advantage of comparative opportunities, both by benefiting from the advanced state of historiography for Victorian popular science and (...) by engaging with a generation of historiographic innovations by scholars in U.S. history, American studies, literature, and art history. Second, the emergence of popular science in the context of the republican ethos of the antebellum period provides an important vantage point from which to assess the extent to which the general issue of “popular science” and its cognates is historically variable and multiple in terms of the politics of knowledge. Third, the ramifications of the development of popular science for relations between science and the public well into the twentieth century cannot be understood until we gain a more clearly developed sense of the emergent period. (shrink)

Figuring Animals is a collection of fifteen essays concerning the representation of animals in literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and cultural practice. At the turn of the new century, it is helpful to reconsider our inherited understandings of the species, some of which are still useful to us. It is also important to look ahead to new understandings and new dialogue, which may contribute to the survival of us all. The contributors to this volume participate in this dialogue in (...) a variety of ways--through personal experience, natural history, cultural studies, philosophical inquiry, art history, literary analysis, film studies, and theoretical imagining, and through a combination of these trains of thought. The essays expose weaknesses in western epistemological frames of reference that for centuries have limited our views and, thus, our experiences of animal being, including our own. (shrink)

Utilizing an evolutionary perspective has proven fruitful in a number of areas of interest outside of the standard psychological or anthropological topics. This includes a wide range of fields from applied disciplines such as law, criminology, medicine, and marketing, to the study of the imagined worlds found in art and literature, the domains of the humanities. A number of excellent books, as well as numerous articles, detail the impressive work done in applying evolutionary insights to the study of art (...) and literature. This article focuses on evolutionarily informed explorations of popular culture, an area that, only relatively recently, has benefited from research taking this approach. The existing scholarship in this area will be reviewed, and future directions and challenges highlighted. (shrink)

This paper gives an overview of the placebo effect in popular culture, especially as it pertains to the work of authors Patrick O’Brian and Sinclair Lewis. The beloved physician as placebo, and the clinician scientist as villain are themes that respectively inform the novels, The Hundred Days and Arrowsmith. Excerpts from the novels, and from film show how the placebo effect, and the randomized clinical trial, have emerged into popular culture, and evolved over time.

Objectives: In this study the author aimed to provide information for researchers to help them with the selection of suitable databases for finding medical ethics literature. The quantity of medical ethical literature that is indexed in different existing electronic bibliographies was ascertained. Method: Using the international journal index Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory, journals on medical ethics were identified. The electronic bibliographies indexing these journals were analysed. In an additional analysis documentalists indexing bioethical literature were asked to name European (...) journals on medical ethics. The bibliographies indexing these journals were examined. Results: Of 290 journals on medical ethics 173 were indexed in at least one bibliography. Current Contents showed the highest coverage with 66 (22.8%) journals indexed followed by MEDLINE (22.1%). By a combined search in the top ten bibliographies with the highest coverage, a maximum coverage of 45.2% of all journals could be reached. All the bibliographies showed a tendency to index more North American than European literature. This result was verified by the supplementary analysis of a sample of continental European journals. Here EMBASE covered the highest number of journals (20.6%) followed by the Russian Academy of Sciences Bibliographies (19.2%). Conclusion: A medical ethics literature search has to be carried out in several databases in order to reach an adequate collection of literature. The databases one wishes to combine should be carefully chosen. There seems to be a regional bias in the most popular databases, favouring North American periodicals compared with European literature on medical ethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recruitment into the scientific community is one oft-stated goal of science education—in the post-Sputnik United States, for example—but this obscures the fact that science textbooks are often read by people who will never be scientists. It cannot be presupposed that science textbooks for younger audiences, students in primary and secondary schools, function in this way. For this reason, precollegiate-level science textbooks are sometimes discussed as a subset of literature popularizing science. The high school science classroom and the textbook (...) are forums for exposing the public to science. The role of governments and educational institutions in regulating the consumption of these texts not only determines which books are used; it influences how they are written, read, and deemed authoritative. Therefore such science textbooks should not be seen as (at best) the disjunction of texts-for-training and books-for-popularization. A changing sense of what “textbooks” are compels a different understanding of their use in the history of science. (shrink)

Discusses the relationship between popular music and literature in conjunction with the connection between high and low art.

The study of highly imagistic representations of Spinoza's philosophy found in popular, extra‐academic literature is essential for building a rational view on Spinoza's philosophy. Popular literature on Spinoza is an ineliminable condition of academic literature on Spinoza. The cementing of Spinoza's popularity belongs to a larger history of Spinoza's reception. This chapter examines two late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth century works on Spinoza. Jules Prat's idiosyncratic blend of Spinozism and left‐wing French Republicanism stands out as a historically (...) and philosophically rich approach to Spinoza that has hardly been studied thus far. The chapter also examines the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernard Malamud. One common feature to Singer and Malamud is the way that they root their Spinozists in a Jewish world. In this, they are forerunners of the ongoing popular preoccupation with Spinoza's own relation to Judaism. (shrink)

This article analyzes selected short stories in Cecelia Ahern’s thirty-narrative collection Roar to see how the perspectives of posthuman and postfeminist critique can be incorporated via the common dystopic umbrella into the mainstream female readership of romance literature. The dystopic worlds created by Ahern in Roar portray inequality and power imbalances with regard to gender and sex. The protagonists are mostly middle-aged women whose family and personal lives are either regulated by dystopic realities or acquire a “dystopic” dimension, the (...) solutions to which are provided by, among other tropes, “posthuman” transformations. Roar introduces other-than-human elements, mostly corporeal alterations, in which the female bodies of Ahern’s characters become de-formed and re-formed beyond androcentric systems of value. The article raises the question of whether feminist and, to some extent, “posthuman” approaches, need to be popularized in such an abridged way as Ahern does in her volume. The answer depends upon the identification of the target audience and their expectations. Ahern’s Roar represents popular literature intended to be sold to as many readers as possible, regardless of their education, state of knowledge, etc. Viewed from that perspective, what some critics could perceive as the collection’s structural weaknesses constitutes its utmost marketing asset. The essay argues that despite not being a structurally innovative work of art, Ahern’s book fulfils the basic requirements of the popular fiction genre, intermittently providing some extra, literary gratification and popularizing rudimentary elements of the posthuman and postfeminist thought. (shrink)

Although Habermas has written about the cultural role of literature and about literary works, he has not systematically articulated a literary-critical method as a component of either communicative reason or post-metaphysical thinking. Habermas and Literature brings Habermasian concepts and categories into contact with aesthetic and cultural theories in and around the Frankfurt School, and beyond. Its central claim is that Habermas' contribution to literary and cultural criticism is the concept of literary rationality and the notion that literature (...) performs a key role in the formation of the modern social imaginary. -/- Habermas and Literature maintains that literary works have “two faces” – discursive intervention in the public sphere and personal integration of imaginative disclosures – that depend upon two modalities of literary reception: critique and identification. It develops the resulting literary theory through detailed discussion of the theories advanced by Habermas, followed in each case by synthetic and reconstructive argumentation that brings the framework of communicative reason into dialogue with literary methods, aesthetic theories and psychoanalytic categories. It does so through close engagement with debates around aesthetic rationality, world disclosure, social imaginaries, post-secular society and the utopian demand for happiness articulated by artworks. In the process, the Habermasian position is critically reconstructed when necessary, with reference to psychoanalytic and literary theories, and tested, in relation to demanding fiction and popular works. (shrink)