Suchergebnisse

In their groundbreaking Hegemony and socialist strategy (1985), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe develop a new account of radical politics in which the subjective construction of hegemony establishes political conditions, not the objective historical stages and class contexts of traditional Hegelian Marxism. On this basis, they forcefully justify the 'identity politics' of contemporary women's, African-American, gay, and working class groups and organisations and oppose both the hegemony of the new right and the 'classism' and revolutionary orientation of the radical left. In their later work, they elaborate their accounts of hegemony and move in new directions. In On populist reason (2005) and The rhetorical foundations of society (2014), Laclau draws on poststructuralist discourse or rhetoric as well as notions of populism or the masses to show that hegemony involves what he terms antagonism, frontiers or we/they oppositions, equivalential logics, and other elements. By contrast, in On the political (2005) and Agonistics: thinking the world politically (with Wagner, 2013), Mouffe elaborates the notion of the fissured subject which, as she and Laclau argued in Hegemony, was constituted by the antagonisms of diverse social movements or the dislocation of social structures; however, her new accounts of the antagonisms or, as she says, 'agonisms' dividing the political field forcefully oppose universal norms of rationality or democracy in order to establish a genuine pluralism on a national and a global scale.

ABSTRACT
Although Mark Twain's Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and his Extraordinary Twins began as a single work, Twain separated them, in a decision that has a bearing on the reception of the better-known Pudd'nhead Wilson. After briefly summarizing the differences between Twins and Pudd'nhead Wilson, this article discusses the reception history of the latter book, including the reviews, which gave the novel a mixed reception until the 1950s, when it achieved the status of a classic comparable to Huckleberry Finn: the diverse and contrary analyses of the academic criticism and the highly divided feelings of recent online responses. This article will show, moreover, that changing cultural institutions explain the differences and divisions of the reviews, which are public and general, the academic criticism, which is specialized and autonomous, and the online responses, which derive from the novel's educational contexts.