Terrorism and Politics: The Case of Northern Ireland's Loyalist Paramilitaries

This article reviews the history of the various political parties associated with the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA): the two main loyalist or Protestant terrorist organizations in Northern Ireland. In the 1970s and 1980s, the UDA was more successful than the UVF in establishing a political presence, partly because it had the more distinct political philosophy and partly because its political leaders were able to distance themselves from the organization's terror campaign. However, since the ceasefires of 1994, fortunes have been reversed. The UVF's political party has been more successful; partly because it has managed to create the more distinct political position and partly because the new climate made close association with terrorism something of a political advantage.     

The Gothic,the Death Drive and Angela Carter

Abstract

This essay situates Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) in a 1970s era in which a feminist reclaiming of various things—the streets, the night, as well as fairy tales—is the order of the day. It examines the complex nature of Carter's status, in this context, as a controversial writer. Is Carter a writer who contests or colludes with the forms of reality presented in and by her fiction? This question may be seen as framing the main debate about Carter as a ‘problematic’ or ‘polarizing’ figure. The different sides of this argument are assessed in this essay. From reading ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as an exemplary reworking of the Gothic, and itself one of Carter's fictions of the death drive, the essay reaches a clear conclusion of its own regarding the vexed contest/collude dimension of Carter's storytelling.     

The paradoxical effects of macluhanisme: Cazeneuve,Baudrillard and Barthes

In the mid-1960s the controversial ideas of media guru Marshall McLuhan hit France like a cyclone. ‘Macluhanisme’ is the summarization of the basic tenets of his theory and marks the paradoxical mire into which one was thrown by engaging with them. For to criticize McLuhan was to resist his truth by rationalization. Criticism. also put one in the position of being labelled a counter-revolutionary since McLuhan aligned himself, albeit rhetorically and despite his conservative politics, with counter-cultural tendencies. Moreover, he was condemned by university professors as a charlatan, but widely supported by media workers. This support exposed the political issue of who was, in French intellectual life, in a position to authenticate ideas. This study traces the effects of macluhanisme through the work of the sociologist of the media and administrator Jean Cazeneuve, the cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, whose debts to McLuhan are well-recognized but little explored, and Roland Barthes, with whom McLuhan met in Paris to discuss (but never accomplished) a collaborative project.