Georgia Christinidis | University of Rostock (original) (raw)

Journal Articles by Georgia Christinidis

Cultural Critique 89, 2015

This article uses ancient views of knowledge and citizenship to defamiliarize contemporary discur... more This article uses ancient views of knowledge and citizenship to defamiliarize contemporary discursive paradigms and to suggest that they can, in some respects, provide a template for rethinking our views of citizenship and of the social function of the humanities. The discourse of the knowledge-based economy is at the heart of contemporary higher education policy. It implies not only the central significance of knowledge production and circulation for the economy, but also the primacy of economic considerations in defining the function of knowledge. By contrast, in the ancient world, the end of education and knowledge was conceptualized in political rather than economic terms, and this primacy of the political over the economic is historically one of the central tenets of a liberal education. Hence, the discourse of the knowledge-based economy itself plays a decisive role in bringing about the current crisis of the humanities. While this crisis cannot be resolved without rethinking the relationship between the economic and the political aspects of society, both philanthropic funding and a discursive engagement with the premises of the knowledge-based economy can constitute pragmatic ways of dealing with the crisis while it lasts.

""This article uses ancient views of knowledge and citizenship to defamiliarize contemporary disc... more ""This article uses ancient views of knowledge and citizenship to defamiliarize contemporary discursive paradigms and to suggest that they can, in some respects, provide a template for rethinking our views of citizenship and of the social function of the humanities. The discourse of the knowledge-based economy is at the heart of contemporary higher education policy. It implies not
only the central significance of knowledge production and circulation for the economy, but also the primacy of economic considerations in defining the function of knowledge. By contrast, in the ancient world, the end of education and knowledge was conceptualized in political rather than economic terms, and this primacy of the political over the economic is historically one of the central tenets of a liberal education. Hence, the discourse of the knowledge-based economy itself plays a decisive role in bringing about the current crisis of the humanities. While this crisis cannot be resolved without rethinking the relationship between the economic and the political aspects of society, both philanthropic funding and a discursive engagement with the premises of the knowledge-based economy can constitute pragmatic ways of dealing with the crisis while it lasts.""

The discourse of the knowledge (-based) economy constitutes a particular challenge for the humani... more The discourse of the knowledge (-based) economy constitutes a particular challenge for the humanities: where the role of the university is thought of in purely economic terms, the humanities must strive for legitimacy exclusively on the grounds of their ability to contribute to economic and technological development. This discourse fundamentally disempowers the humanities by neglecting their specificity and socializing function. The articles contained in this special issue seek to expand the paradigm within which the role of the humanities, both in the academy and in society more broadly, is conceptualized. Central to this is examining the changing functions which the humanities have fulfilled in different historical and cultural contexts.

Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus adapts Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre to formulate a critique of... more Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus adapts Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre to formulate a critique of society that is optimistic only in its claims regarding the possibility of social change. Wilhelm Meister extensively uses foreshadowing, a narrative device with fatalistic implications, to reconcile apparent opposites and legitimise the status quo. The narrative of Nights at the Circus is punctuated by a series of disruptions of narrative continuity and transgressions of logicality, which are not in themselves sufficient to induce change but constitute significant opportunities that must be seized. The voluntaristic implications of this emphasis on the conjuncture are counterbalanced by Carter's insistence on the importance of reciprocal relationships in shaping the individual and of acting out virtue in a public arena. Carter's ironic utopias exhort her readers to dare to imagine a reality in which confidence, reciprocity and love do not need to appear in the mode of irony.

Book Chapter by Georgia Christinidis

If you are interested in obtaining a copy of this paper, please contact me.

Journal Special Issues by Georgia Christinidis

Book Reviews by Georgia Christinidis

Talks by Georgia Christinidis

Cultural Critique 89, 2015

If you are interested in obtaining a copy of this paper, please contact me.

"Fruit of the Lemon transforms the Bildungsroman-genre in important ways. Whereas in the classica... more "Fruit of the Lemon transforms the Bildungsroman-genre in important ways. Whereas in the classical Bildungsroman, the protagonist acquires self-knowledge through a journey from the country to the city or from the margins to the centre, where an encounter with diversity catalyses self-recognition, Faith Jackson leaves the metropolis to travel to Jamaica. Though the metropolis is represented as a space offering the possibility of cultural exchange as well as of social mobility, Faith is unable to successfully navigate this space due to her lack of a clear sense of identity. She ultimately derives this sense from encountering the specificity of Jamaica as a place as well as learning about her family’s past. Thus, self-knowledge is based on her experience of the margins and the authenticity they represent rather than from an encounter with the centre and the possibilities it offers. Fruit of the Lemon therefore takes a much more skeptical attitude towards the role of the metropolis than, for instance, Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane, where the city is seen as a space of acculturation: the acculturation-model is based on the premise that choice is a constitutive factor in identity formation; Faith’s marginality, however, is caused by her ‘race’ rather than by a failure to assimilate to a culture the imperatives of which she seems, in fact, to have internalised only all too well.

In order to elucidate the ways in which the authenticity of the margins is nevertheless self-consciously staged and ultimately problematised by the novel, my paper will explore what I call the ‘authenticity effect’, a concept based on Dean MacCannell’s term “staged authenticity”. In tourist settings, authenticity is staged through the enactment of crossing the boundaries between ‘front’ and ‘back’ areas. Literary texts may enact similar boundary crossings to generate an ‘authenticity effect’ which is characteristic of Levy’s novels as well as relatively wide-spread in twenty-first century literature."

The truth claims made by realism can concern different aspects of reality and therefore be associ... more The truth claims made by realism can concern different aspects of reality and therefore be associated with distinct ethical imperatives. This presentation will briefly sketch two different types of truth claims made by fiction: the first type concerns the depiction of personal experience, the second concerns world-making, a truthful representation of the social totality. It will then continue to spell out the ethical imperatives addressed to literature associated with each of these types of claim, indicate their relative importance in recent critical debates and aesthetic practices, and ask whether a re-valorisation of the two kinds of realism is justified ethically and aesthetically.
On the one hand, fiction can claim to authentically represent the experience of the individual. Here, the ethical imperative entails respect for the specificity of the experience concerned, which must be captured adequately. Critical debates regarding authenticity have particularly focused on the areas of transcultural communication – adequate representations of migrant and minority experiences – and of trauma, particularly after the attacks of 9/11. As trauma is conceptualized as unrepresentable, authentically representing survivors’ experiences constitutes a fundamental challenge to the realist mode. Adorno held that it was impossible to adequately represent the Holocaust, famously declaring there would be no art after Auschwitz and valorising the modernist poetry of Paul Celan, with its refusal of direct representation. This refusal of realism may, however, be argued to entail a dismissal of the specificity of individual experience that is itself ethically problematic. Passages from Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and De Lillo’s Falling Man will be examined to assess the comparative effectiveness of realist and non-realist strategies in representing trauma.
The realist novel of the nineteenth century does not restrict itself to authentically representing the experience of the individual; its narrative universe holds up a mirror to the social totality - for instance in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The ethical imperative associated with this function of literature is an evaluative analysis of the social reality the novel is trying to depict, an assessment of which phenomena are of central significance at a particular time, which is the precondition of social critique. This mode of realist representation has, however, lost its central significance with the advent of modernism, leading Terry Eagleton to argue, in Exiles and Emigrés, that a successful representation of the social totality has become an unreachable goal. Nevertheless, realist novels that are read as a valid depiction of society at a given time, rather than merely an embodiment of a socially specific experience, still exist, including, for instance, Martin Amis’s fiction, which is regarded as paradigmatic of the new “classless” society. The validity of Amis’s realist vision of society in Money will be compared with the use of cognitive mapping and allegory to make sense of the shape of society in the speculative fictions of J. G. Ballard.

This thesis traces the relationship between literary value and cultural agency in the context of ... more This thesis traces the relationship between literary value and cultural agency in the context of cultural criticism through the work of five key critics, Wyndham Lewis, F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Stuart Hall and John Fiske. All of them criticise society in cultural terms, implying a need for change, but have difficulties conceptualising the agency which could lead to change. Wyndham Lewis is the epitome of modernist elitism. He conceptualises both art and intellectuals, the only agents, as autonomous. As a result, however, the intellectuals’ agency is reduced to self-stylisation and momentary disruption. The Leavises attempt to constitute a critical minority through an educational project in order to combat the effects of the disintegration of the organic community. While their criticism asserts the effectiveness of cultural agency, it is elitist, restricting this agency to a minority. Stuart Hall questions the cultural values which form the normative basis of the criticism of Wyndham Lewis and the Leavises. While he is the only one of the critics discussed whose critical practice has a concrete goal, the realisation of socialism, his theory stops at the preconditions of agency, namely the constitution and the positioning of collective or individual agents. Lastly, John Fiske asserts that people are continuously actively participating in culture, but reduces agency to choice. The difficulties of conceptualising agency in the realm of culture express themselves in a series of tropes, particularly in the predominance of spatial over temporal metaphors, and in the trope of excess or ‘something more,’ which provides an impulse, but not an agent or a goal, for cultural intervention.

"Beyond the Knowledge Economy? The Changing Role of the University" (Special Issue), Journal of the Knowledge Economy 4:1 (March 2013)