Kate McLoughlin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748647316
- eISBN:
- 9780748684380
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748647316.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In ‘Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea’, Kate McLoughlin investigates social performance in the context of JÜ;rgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action. The putative tea-party in T. S. ...
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In ‘Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea’, Kate McLoughlin investigates social performance in the context of JÜ;rgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action. The putative tea-party in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (written 1910-11) is, in Habermasian terms, a less than ideal public sphere; Prufrock and his interlocutors lack the necessary ‘communicative competence’ with which to reach common understanding. Disclosing the affinities between Habermas’s ideas and the philosophies of Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley (studied by Eliot at Harvard), the chapter explores why Eliot chose to locate communicative failure in an occasion so apparently benign as a tea-party. The party becomes ‘an alien ritual, possible formally to describe but not to enter into […] unsusceptible both to external explanation and to internal communication’.Less
In ‘Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea’, Kate McLoughlin investigates social performance in the context of JÜ;rgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action. The putative tea-party in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (written 1910-11) is, in Habermasian terms, a less than ideal public sphere; Prufrock and his interlocutors lack the necessary ‘communicative competence’ with which to reach common understanding. Disclosing the affinities between Habermas’s ideas and the philosophies of Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley (studied by Eliot at Harvard), the chapter explores why Eliot chose to locate communicative failure in an occasion so apparently benign as a tea-party. The party becomes ‘an alien ritual, possible formally to describe but not to enter into […] unsusceptible both to external explanation and to internal communication’.
George Vasilev
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748697304
- eISBN:
- 9781474416153
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748697304.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics
Chapter 4 explores the mechanisms through which political actors in positions of power can be influenced to dismantle unjust decision-making and legal structures from which they benefit. It is argued ...
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Chapter 4 explores the mechanisms through which political actors in positions of power can be influenced to dismantle unjust decision-making and legal structures from which they benefit. It is argued that when such actors are hostile towards principled reform and have the ability to withstand democratic challenges to their privileged position, a combination of civil disobedience and intervention by actors external to the society is required to compel them out of their intransigence. The chapter presents conditionality and transnational networking as practical expressions of this mode of structural change and considers how these practices can inform future efforts at principled reform.Less
Chapter 4 explores the mechanisms through which political actors in positions of power can be influenced to dismantle unjust decision-making and legal structures from which they benefit. It is argued that when such actors are hostile towards principled reform and have the ability to withstand democratic challenges to their privileged position, a combination of civil disobedience and intervention by actors external to the society is required to compel them out of their intransigence. The chapter presents conditionality and transnational networking as practical expressions of this mode of structural change and considers how these practices can inform future efforts at principled reform.
