D. L. LeMahieu

Exchange Value: British “Scholarship Boys” in Mid-Twentieth-Century America

In the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of British “scholarship boys” traveled to America sponsored by British and American foundations. Their experiences in the United States qualify and complicate existing narratives about upwardly mobile meritocrats. First, Americans regarded these figures in a manner that helped alter their view of themselves. Distinctions that mattered in Britain became less significant in America, though scholarship boys remained shrewd enough to penetrate the veneer of a superficial egalitarianism. National identity became a marker that sidelined residual anxieties about social hierarchy. Second, American prosperity affected the bias against consumerism shared by many British intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century. As professionals supported by government or educational institutions, these visitors differentiated themselves from those in the private sector, which pursued other goals. America exposed scholarship boys to a system that assimilated consumerism without sacrificing professionalism and a commitment to social progress.

Life Writing and Philosophy: Bryan Magee and the Subjectivities of the Examined Life

ABSTRACT An independent man of letters in an era of professional philosophers, Bryan Magee wrote extensively about the personal origins of his philosophic interests and activities. The emotions and subjectivities of his early years helped shape a polymath whose deep absorption in culture and compulsive need to communicate created a unique figure in modern Britain. This article analyses Magee’s personal narratives of both isolation and connection. It shows why and how he brought philosophers to a larger audience and a new public to philosophy.

Kermode’s War

Frank Kermode’s autobiographical recollections of the Second World War disclose much about one of the most prominent literary critics of the twentieth century. They reveal in part the personal and affective origins of his existentialism, a philosophy that permeated his early literary criticism and contributed to a wider cultural discourse in mid-twentieth-century Britain. They also help explain his later preoccupation with the ‘fictions’ of communication. His naval experiences taught him how words could not begin to capture the traumas of lived experience, a lesson he later developed and refined. Finally, Kermode’s war experiences help explain the generational conflict that separated him from his younger colleagues and convinced him that individuals remain embedded within a historical moment they can neither choose nor escape.

Being-Here: Heidegger in the 21st century

Both these fine books stress how Heidegger made the familiar strange. Focusing his entire philosophical career on ontology, Heidegger created a provocative new German vocabulary to describe the mystery and bewildering complexities of phenomena and their interpretation within a lived world that encompasses all beings. Heidegger wrote over 100 volumes of dense prose to explore ontological issues and inevitably changed his mind about some of them, opening the door to generations of scholarship that argue over the meaning of intrinsically ambiguous concepts about foundational issues. Every phenomenon changes when examined from a slightly different angle and the limitations of language confound the interpretation of ontological understanding. Both these books acknowledge the difficulties of their subject matter, admit when they cannot follow Heidegger’s reasoning, and confront the numerous controversies that surround this puzzling and immensely influential German thinker. Braver provides a detailed, often section-by-section, commentary on Heidegger’s most important writings. Written in clear, assessable language, his book expresses hardwon insights without pretentiousness or mystification, a remarkable feat. Braver devotes over half his book to Being and Time, a seminal work of the 20th century that Heidegger apparently hurried to complete to justify an academic promotion. The title contains the answer to the central question of the book, although, as Braver sardonically notes, it is not particularly illuminating to say that time is the meaning of being. Braver creates what he calls the “Hermeneutic Spiral” to describe Heidegger’s constant return to the same inter-related issues, probed from a different perspective to seek a deeper understanding. Every provisional answer provokes new questions that in turn offer fresh insights that themselves must be queried. This perpetual encirclement creates organizational problems that Braver heroically attempts to sort out, although inevitably such recurrence, replete with often the same Germanic terminology now subtly re-defined, might flummox readers not sufficiently caffeinated. 563046 NMS0010.1177/1461444814563046New Media & SocietyReview Essay research-article2015

Book Review: Steven Shaviro: Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2009; xvi + 174 pp.: 9780262195768, US

One of the strengths of this collection is its careful negotiation between (1) the establishment of the tradition and parameters of the workshop-based digital storytelling innovation and (2) the manifestations that challenge those very parameters. It is hard to see how the act of pretending to be a deer (albeit one blessed with magical powers) within the Endless Forest multiplayer game described in Chapter 15 engages participants in the kind of social change that Joe Lambert defines as necessary earlier in the book. Wu Qiongli’s articulation of a digital storytelling ‘commercialization framework’ for China in Chapter 16 also seems to overstep this definition of digital storytelling as emancipatory. For Lambert, the use of digital storytelling for research, evaluation and marketing purposes, and the production of stories that imitate the ‘empty-headed bling of commercial television’ simply ‘coopts the concept’ (p. 82). This collection’s greatest strength, from the perspective of an academic concerned to facilitate social change through research, is its attempt (albeit a little thin) to begin to theorize digital storytelling, and to profile some methodologies for evaluation. Many of us who work in qualitative research (especially those who have attended CDS workshops) need no convincing of the power of digital storytelling for action research, and as a new form of engaged and collaborative ethnographic research methodology that aims to empower and enable change rather than document a status quo. We know that digital storytelling can be a deeply transformative and positive experience for participants. But we know this primarily through intuition, observation, conversation and emotional response – types of knowledge rarely welcomed within academic frameworks. To write the persuasive publications and grant applications needed to fund digital storytelling programmes in a research context, we need to construct both theories for understanding the process and methods for its evaluation. Jean Burgess and Helen Klabe write in Chapter 10 that the ‘Sharing Stories’ project in ‘public history’ and ‘cultural citizenship’ (p. 157) at Kelvin Grove Urban Village in Brisbane, Australia, used the focus group method to evaluate the stories produced. Jo Tacchi writes in Chapter 11 that the ‘Finding a Voice’ project used multi-sited participatory ethnography as a research method in tandem with projects in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. I would love to hear more about the methods employed in these projects. My curiosity is piqued but not satisfied. Nonetheless, it is a joy to know that some practitioners are forging ahead in this regard.

28.00 (hbk)

Illustrations. Introduction. Part 1 The rise of modern commercial culture, 1890-1930: Producers and consumers technology and tradition. Part 2 The response of the cultivated elites: The reassertion of cultural hierarchy regaining authority - approaches to cultural reform technology and the quest for aesthetic tradition. Part 3 The 1930s - towards a common culture: Sight and sound - studies in convergence literature - the strategies and paradoxes of cultural dissent. Works cited. Index.