In Chinese films with intangible cultural heritage themes, female images are an indispensable presence. Particularly, several renowned female hero figures derived from folklore literature, such as Liu Sanjie, Ashima, and Hua Mulan, stand out as symbols of both traditional Chinese heroines and the cultural zeitgeist. This paper utilizes Roland Barthes' semiotic theory to analyze the characteristics of these three representative intangible cultural heritage-themed folk literature films. By employing text analysis methods, it examines the elements of costume, dialogue, setting, and plot (...) in these films. These symbolic elements elucidate the development of female characters and cultural transformations, revealing how traditional culture is represented and transmitted in modern media. The paper also explores the crucial role and value of women in the preservation and inheritance of intangible cultural heritage, offering suggestions for better shaping the images of female heroes in intangible cultural heritage-themed films. (shrink)

On the one hand, al-Khansā, who made a name for himself in the Jahiliyyah and Islamic period with his laments, on the other hand Antigone, who appears in the famous tragedy of Sophocles; The life stories of these two women and the tragic events that shaped their characters have interesting similarities as well as worth examining. Both have tragically lost their siblings and have become the epitome of sadness and tragedy due to the hardships they have endured. While al-Khansā (...) was mentioned as one of the greatest female Arab poets in her own time and later periods; Antigone, on the other hand, drew a strong female figure with her firm stance, determination and the king's discourses against the king of Thebes. Antigone is a tragic hero, and Khansā is a reflection of her in real life. In addition to this coincidental resemblance in their stories, their effects on the people after them also made them worth examining. Antigone has gained a place in world literature as a symbol with her strong character and has inspired some movements, especially feminism. al-Khansā, on the other hand, has an important place in Arabic literature with her female poet identity and laments. Such a study was deemed necessary in order to fully determine the contributions of these two women, who have made history, in the world literature, social and cultural fields. The life stories of these two women, which constitute the main subject of our article, were discussed in general terms, their similar and different aspects were pointed out under separate titles, and finally, the study was concluded by comparing the two characters. (shrink)

Empirical tests described in this article support hypotheses derived from evolutionary theory on the perceptions of literary characters. The proper and dark heroes in British Romantic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries respectively represent long-term and short-term mating strategies. Recent studies indicate that for long-term relationships, women seek partners with the ability and willingness to sustain paternal investment in extended relationships. For short-term relationships, women choose partners whose features indicate high genetic quality. In hypothetical (...) scenarios, females preferred proper heroes for long-term relationships. The shorter the relationship under consideration, the more likely women were to choose dark heroes as partners. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece by Kirk OrmandAndromache KaranikaKirk Ormand. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. x + 265 pp. Cloth, $90.The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, a text in fragmentary form that poses questions about its date, performance, and genre context, is put in new light in the rigorous study by Kirk Ormand, who traces (...) the main themes and mythological details of the Catalogue’s intriguing storytelling. With the external façade of a recounting poem largely connected to heroic genealogies, the Catalogue has attracted significant scholarly attention. Ormand breaks new ground by focusing consistently throughout his book not solely on matters of poetic production but rather on the “end result” and the social forces that produced and proliferated the poem. The key themes of contest, rape, marriage, and changes in the institution of marriage become the template on which the mythological structure of heroic genealogies is set. Ormand sees them not as a static platform but as the moving axis that problematizes female roles as women change home and status. The Catalogue presents largely the consumption of women without ever presenting a female point of view; the female figures are tools in creating heroic genealogies with the birth of the hero as a focal point without much interest in further births or other moments of the female life. As becomes clear from the first introductory chapter, Ormand assumes an authorial stance that is well aware of the oral hexametric epic tradition but is also consciously creating an act of aristocratic nostalgia of the past in the new political frame of the polis.The second chapter delves into much-needed research on the socioeconomic exchange of hedna, a practice often conflated with dowry and aristocratic wedding gift exchange. Ormand carefully disentangles the literary attestations and underlines how hedna was a marker of aristocratic values distinct from other forms of gifts. Influenced by Ian Morris’ view that oral poetry reflects social practices at the times of performance that resonate with audiences, Ormand brings a new understanding of hedna not as economic exchange in a bride-wealth social nexus (according to the anthropological work of Jack Goody) but rather as something that ensures a kind of membership, so to speak, in an aristocratic club. Functioning like a hidden auction, the offering of hedna creates a competitive framework that silently raises the price of aristocratic membership. Displaying and offering more wealth ensures belonging to the elite but also defines the measure that marks and solidifies aristocratic status while raising the bar for others. Marriage offers the forum of competition, and the bride becomes a marker of value (through her beauty) that enables such a kind of gift-giving, and, through it, belonging to the elite. By exploring the historical context and literary attestations of this type [End Page 171] of gift exchange, Ormand presents a convincing case that the Catalogue, an epic poem that can be largely seen functioning as a counterpart of sympotic poetry, has a similar role: within the early context of the rising polis it provides an elite ideology connecting aristocrats to heroes through the nexus of the poetic (undemocratic) device of hedna.In chapter 3, Ormand’s analysis of the story of Mestra, a well-known shape shifter in myth, lucidly illustrates his arguments about elite ideology and how marriage defines female identity in the narrative of the Catalogue. Connections between the female and mobility are of course not new, but Ormand brings a new point of view to a central issue in archaic and classical literature, namely, the implicit struggle between natal and spousal families for the woman (as in the myths of Demeter and Persephone, the Danaids, Antigone, and Electra, among others). In the Hesiodic narrative of Mestra, her shape-shifting and passage from rape to marriage exemplify social tensions and the evolution of social and legal thinking on citizenship, endogamy, and exogamy and ultimately the oikos as a unit of the polis.The fourth chapter shifts toward the fluidity in oral poetic production and culminates in a parallel reading of Atalanta’s race with Hippomenes as a recasting of the... (shrink)

One of the more powerful recurring motifs in theIliadis that of the grief-stricken woman lamenting the death of a hero. As with much else in the Homeric epics, these scenes have a formulaic character; when Briseis laments Patroclus, and Hecuba, Andromache and Helen lament Hector, each is depicted delivering a specialized form of speech, specific to the context of a woman's lament. The narrative depiction of grieving women, as well, is formalized, with specific gestures and recurring images that typify (...) these scenes. One element of this depiction that has largely escaped serious consideration is the comparison of a woman in her initial moment of recognition of the corpse to Aphrodite. In this article, I will argue that the allusion is not merely to her beauty but to the myth of Aphrodite and Adonis, specifically the moment of the goddess’ discovery of the death of her mortal lover. As the earliest surviving explicit reference to Adonis in Greek literature appearsc.600b.c.e., this would require a raising of theterminus ante quemfor the transmission of the Adonis myth from the Near East to the mid eighth century. (shrink)

In spite of their performance of highly valuable roles in the civil rights movement, southern Black women remain a category of invisible, unsung heroes and leaders. Utilizing archival data and a subsample of personal interviews conducted with civil rights leaders, this article explores the specific leadership roles of Black women activists; describes the experiences of selected Black women activists from their own “standpoint”; and offers explanations for the lack of recognition and non-inclusion of Black women (...) in the recognized leadership cadre of the civil rights movement. The modern southern-based struggle is most illustrative of how the interlocking systems of gender, race, and class structure Black women's movement leadership and participation. (shrink)

What can Western feminism hope to learn from women whose feminisms were originally shaped by experiences behind the ‘Iron Curtain’? In the first instance, an acute sensitivity to the importance of a politics that is responsive to needs. In its social democratic heyday, Western feminism had embraced a politics of contested need interpretation. Now, though, a neoliberal version has converted feminism into an attitudinal resource for the individual woman who is bent upon success. The takeover was made easy by (...) the poor self-understanding of social democratic feminism. My paper will compare Agnes Heller’s theory of ‘radical needs’ and Maria Márkus’s account of the ‘politicization of needs’ and apply both to the normative clarification of endangered feminist agendas. We look to the Budapest School women for more than just a way of conceptualizing the political radicalism of modern feminism as a social movement. Women need heroes too and a reflection upon the dignified and admirable lives of Agnes Heller and Maria Márkus has much to contribute to an ongoing search for a feminist ethic of the self. (shrink)

Emerald Fennell’s debut feature Promising Young Woman (2020) incisively examines sexual assault, misogyny, and the culture of complicity that continues to perpetuate `violence against women. This article will establish Fennell’s aptitude as a filmmaker in condemning the pervasive forces of patriarchal social order in harmony with Kate Manne’s account of structural misogyny analyzed in Down Girl (2017) and Entitled (2020). Fennell’s subversion of genre standards demonstrates how the actions of individuals, separate from the perpetrator, lead to additional acts of (...) harm, and addresses the ever-present reality of male violence which the feminist-hero is, ultimately, unable to surmount. Despite arguments that Promising Young Woman has not met the expectations for change the me-too movement inspired, Fennell challenges conventions to expose misogyny and male violence asking that future feminist filmgoers consider a new way forward. (shrink)

Explorations Of Faith explores the world of faith invited to in the eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews. The first edition, first made available on Archive.org and Google Books, is here updated with Faith-aphorisms gleaned from the breath-taking exploration of the book. Hebrews 11 has been a favorite chapter of innumerable men and women of faith who draw inspiration from the lives of these great warriors, still when Christ had not come to us in the fullness of times. (...) But, they lived with an eternal perspective, unshaken in resolve, strong in pursuit of the reality that transcends and overtakes the fleeting world that we live in. This volume is dedicated to all who wish to live the life of faith. (shrink)

En el presente artículo analizaré el proceso de feminización sufrido por el protagonista de Orestes como parte del avance de la locura. Por un lado, se adjudica el origen de la enfermedad a unos monstruos femeninos, las Erinias, que además constituyen el objeto de la alucinación; por otro lado, para referirse a la conducta del hijo de Agamenón se registra lenguaje propio de la bacanal, ritual conducido principalmente por mujeres en Grecia. Desde mi punto de vista, la feminización de Orestes (...) alcanza la asimilación con las diosas y las seguidoras de Dioniso, en tanto el personaje actúa como ellas y busca la venganza y el castigo. In this article, I will analyze the feminization process suffered by Orestes’ main character as part of the progress of his madness. On the one hand, the origin of the disease is attributed to feminine monsters, the Erinyes, which are also the hallucination object. On the other hand, it is used when referring to Orestes’ behavior the language of the Bacchanal, a ritual performed mainly by women in Greece. From my point of view, the feminization achieves the assimilation with the Erinyes and the followers of Dionysus, thus the main character acts like them and seeks revenge and punishment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World by Adrienne MayorAlison KeithAdrienne Mayor. The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. xiv + 519 pp. Cloth, $29.95.Adrienne Mayor is a historian of classical folklore and ancient science and the author of several books whose subjects lie at the intersection of classical myth and (...) ancient history with archaeology and the history of science: an exploration of monsters and heroes in the repertoire of classical myth as a response to the discovery of fossils in The First Fossil Hunters (Princeton 2000); a wide-ranging collection of evidence for biological and chemical warfare in the ancient world, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs (New York: Overlook Press, 2003); and a sympathetic biography of Mithradates VI Eupator of Pontus in The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton 2009); as well as an investigation of indigenous North Americans’ accounts of fossils, in Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Princeton 2005). Like her earlier volumes, The Amazons brings together an extraordinarily wide array of evidence, uncovered through prodigious research across such diverse fields as classical mythology, ancient history, and contemporary archaeology of the central Asian steppes, and the results are presented with her trademark narrative brio. As with these earlier volumes, moreover, Mayor has an agenda in The [End Page 174] Amazons: here she seeks the historical reality that lies behind the ancient Greek myths of barbarian warrior women; and she finds it in the recent archaeological discoveries of female warriors interred on the central Asian steppes from the Caucasus to western China.Mayor sets out her premise in a prologue that takes its bearing from the myth of Atalanta, whom she dubs “the Greek Amazon” (1–13): her project is to investigate where the Greeks might have encountered real women warriors like Atalanta, capable of besting men in footraces, on the battlefield, and in the hunt. Her study falls into four parts: Part 1 (17–59) asks, “Who were the Amazons?” and identifies ancient Scythia, with its many horse-riding and horse-herding nomadic tribes, as the homeland of the Amazons. Part 2 (63–246) surveys the archaeological and scientific evidence for female warriors among the nomadic tribes of the central Asian steppes in prehistoric and historic times. In this section, Mayor considers the evidence afforded by the bones of buried nomad warriors misidentified as male (because of the weaponry and horses accompanying the burial) when they were originally excavated but recently recognized as female as a result of newer scientific techniques of examination (chap. 4); the body armor found in the steppe graves, in a discussion which has recourse to comparative ethnography, yielding a rich history of breast suppression (chap. 5); the tattooing practices of the historical nomadic tribes of the steppes in relation to the iconography of Amazons’ tunics and leggings on classical vase paintings (chap. 6); ancient accounts of Amazons’ dress (chap. 7), including their partiality for trousers (chap. 12), sexuality and reproduction (chap. 8), drugs, dance and music (chap. 9), hunting technologies (chap. 11), weapons and warfare (chap. 13), all in relation to the archaeological and historical evidence of steppe women’s practices in these arenas. She even presses into service ethnolinguistics in order to argue that the names of the Amazons can be traced back to a common origin in the Eurasian steppes (chap. 14; cf. Appendix of Names of Amazons and Warrior Women in Ancient Literature and Art from the Mediterranean to China). In Part 3 (249–353), Mayor turns back to “Amazons in Greek and Roman Myth, Legend, and History.” Here she retells the most famous Amazon myths, of Hippolyte and Heracles [sic] (chap. 15), Antiope and Theseus (chap. 16), Penthesilea and Achilles (chap. 18), and the Athenian Amazonomachy (chaps. 17, 19); and classical accounts of their historical counterparts—the dalliance of Thalestris and Alexander the Great (chap. 20) and the love of Hypsicratea and Mithradates (chap. 21). Part 4 (358–429) abandons the Hellenocentric perspective of Part 3 to investigate the evidence for Amazonian women “Beyond the Greek World... (shrink)

These are women who are not only vulnerable but also evidently worthy of the protections or rewards promised: punishment of the rapist or the hero's love ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 369-406 [Access article in PDF] The Body And Its Representations In Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai:Where Does The Costume End? Eva Stehle Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousaiis a rich and funny play, but it gives the impression of lacking a sustained point. Theater directors can happily stage it, subverting Aristophanes by casting women and recasting the text to speak to modern disputes over gender, sex, and politics, as (...) Mary-Kay Gamel has done so wonderfully (see her article in this volume). But the student of comedy who wishes to study the play in the context of its original production in 411, probably at the City Dionysia, has a harder time. Because it has no overt political theme it was for long passed over as a paignion, an escape from relevance in the tense atmosphere of that spring. As a "woman play" it seems less satisfactory than Lysistrata or Ekklesiazousai because it has no female lead character and Euripides' nameless kinsman (whom I call "Inlaw") upstages the women and their concerns. 1 With the current interest in performance and the metatheatrical aspects of comedy, Thesmophoriazousai has finally come into its own as a sly dialogue on theater and ritual, comedy versus tragedy, and gender. 2 But the older view remains in effect that the play has no politics. At the same time, it is assimilated to Aristophanes' other plays in its thematics, while its striking anomalies go unremarked. As a result, it still does not quite come into focus. [End Page 369]As a play about ritual and theater, Thesmophoriazousai is said to absorb women's ritual and restage it within its own festival setting at the City Dionysia. Yet this is the only one of Aristophanes' surviving plays in which the principal male characters exit the stage before the end of the play. Here they flee, in female dress to boot, leaving the chorus to play out the final scene with the Scythian slave. 3 Euripides and Inlaw do not share in the fun of sending the slave running in one wrong direction then another. And the play ends as it began, on Nesteia, the day of fasting for the women performing the Thesmophoria. 4 No revelry brings on the transition to feast and renewal that the audience probably expected. No procession points the way to a new instauration created by the comedy. 5 Given the importance of processions in Athenian life as an expression of community revival, this is a speaking absence. 6As a play about tragedy and comedy, Thesmophoriazousai is said to show the triumph of comedy over tragedy as the more encompassing and flexible art form. The plots of tragedy fail to rescue Inlaw, while a comic plot succeeds: Euripides brings on a dancing girl, Elaphion, who seduces the Scythian slave away for sex while Euripides frees Inlaw. But Euripides' final trick is no comic plot. In the Aristophanic comic plot the [End Page 370] hero wins a desirable young woman, often one whose name promises new fertility, peace, or power; he does not give one away to the blocking figure. 7 Euripides also capitulates to the women, promising never to speak ill of them again. Only by relinquishing both triumph and sex (and thereby also festivity) does he salvage his poor kinsman's life. Euripides' plot fit for a "barbarian nature" (1129) is rather a farcical version of his own rescue-play plot: like Helen and Andromeda it involves deceiving the blocking figure, which allows the principals to escape while leaving others (chorus or a god) to thwart the chase. But its success is based on abandoning pure representation and giving the "real" (within the world of the play) woman away to the internal audience in order to rescue a pseudo-woman.As for gender representation in the play, most analysis holds that men prevail. Different commentators take Aristophanes to be revealing that women on stage are all really men, or questioning what a woman really is since she is the very figure of mimesis, or showing that women deserve... (shrink)

Generations of men and women since antiquity have been preoccupied with the difficult quest for happiness. Up until modernity, people relied on the gods or God to grant them happiness. In the course of the eighteenth century, happiness became both a secular promise and a moral-political claim relevant to all people. The fairy tale Hans im Glück (Hans in Luck), published by the Grimm brothers in the early nineteenth century, and discussed in this article, provides a telling example of (...) a quest for happiness unconcerned with moral prescriptions and social conventions, in which the hero focuses on his own feelings. Two centuries later, modern men and women find themselves in a predicament. Happiness still tops their private wish list but it seems harder than ever to achieve it, with abundant confusion as to what real happiness feels like. Subjective well-being tends to be distinguished from notions of happiness associated with serene bliss and fulfilment, beyond the limits of modern consumer society. Happiness has been defined as ‘people’s perception of the meaningfulness, sense of purpose, and value of their lives’, thus reintroducing morality and higher principles without, however, excluding hedonistic Hans-in-Luck style choices. (shrink)

This article explores an overlooked motif in the Critique of Pure Reason: the Damsel in Distress. Kant uses the trope to motivate his first Critique on a narrative level. Reason is depicted as a high-born female subject in a hopeless predicament, unable to free herself. A hero rescues her, not by liberation, but by discipline, mirroring the myth where the rescued female is appropriated through marriage. The paper examines the parallels between this popular trope and the narrative of the first (...) Critique, arguing that Kant’s choice of this motif is due to cultural and political biases. While this narrative aligns with Kant’s goal of establishing philosophy as a strict science, it marginalizes the also present, progressive potential of Kant’s concept of the highest faculty as a hermeneutical, world-making, and orienting capacity as means for universal cum critical thinking. The discussion proceeds from (1) argumentatively relevant methodological considerations, to showing that Kant (2) does use the damsel in distress in the Critique of Pure Reason. Subsequently, (3) with regard to the reasons for the choice of the narrative, it is argued that it is based on the convictions about the nature of women that Kant advocates in the Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime and in his Anthropology. (4) Insofar as narratives and metaphors shape convictions and delineate the realm of the conceivable, Kant’s narrative choice undermines his own conception of reason, according to which the highest faculty is to be understood positively as an active, hermeneutic and orienting ability as well as a selfreflective basis for critical thinking. The discussion ends (5) with a conclusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 102-117 [Access article in PDF] Gossip and Literary Narrative Blakey Vermeule Northwestern University Since its murky origins in Grub Street, a specter has haunted the novel—the specter of gossip. In its higher-minded mood, literary narratives have been very snobbish about gossip and the snobbishness is unfair. Even the most casual reader of social fiction will recognize that gossiping is what characters do most passionately. (...) However, they can neither admit nor be aware of it. Only minor or morally compromised characters are allowed to indulge in its pleasures. Matronly middle-aged women, chatty maids, little girls, and effeminate fops are the ones who gossip; their more reflective counterparts—the men and women designated as heroes and heroines—only briefly tolerate such idle chatter. Gossip is derided, decried, condemned, and maligned. It is womanish, low, slavish, servantish, silly, pert, loose, wanton, jiggetty, mean. It is the "tittle-tattle of Highbury" in Austen's Emma, an activity for the old maid Miss Bates and her even older, blind, and senile mother. In Middlemarch, although the world is "apparently a huge whispering-gallery," the greatest gossip of all is Mrs. Cadwallader, a matron with a mind like "phosphorous, biting at everything" (Spacks, p. 194). In Richardson's Clarissa, Lovelace—a man not known for his indifference to social information—airily dismisses gossip as "the female go-round." (In novels, the male equivalents of the "female go-round" tend to be such despised modes of exchange as business letters, gambling, chess, and games of chance.) Gossip has always been a part of charivari with the power to turn the world upside down. It also has the power to destroy lives (Les Liasons Dangereuses) and to derail love (when it becomes the "prejudice" of Pride and Prejudice). If it ever innocent, it is only because it is meaningless.Gossip is all of these things even—especially—when it powers the [End Page 102] whole narrative. This paradox is evident almost anywhere we choose to look. Social novelists view the stuff of direct, unmediated social information as so intense that it requires special handling—even disavowal. I will briefly survey examples from French, English, and Russian fiction. The first is a lurid and overheated speech by Henri de Marsay, the peculiar hero of Balzac's short novel, The Girl with the Golden Eyes (1815). De Marsay is a dissipated aristocrat in love with a mysterious young girl who, he finds out much later, is the sexual slave of de Marsay's long-lost sister. But first, after a night of passion that "had begun with a slow trickle of pleasures and ended in overflowing torrents," de Marsay realizes, when his lover accidentally lets slip the name of his rival, that the person he is competing with is female. The next day he becomes consumed with a bitter plan to kill his faithless lover. He reflects to his friend Paul "Upon my honor, man is a clown dancing on the edge of a cliff. We're told about the immorality of Les Liaisons dangereuses, and some book with the name of a chambermaid. But there is one ghastly, dirty, dreadful, corrupting book that is always open and never closed, the great book of the world—not to mention another book, a thousand times more dangerous, that consists of everything passed on by word of mouth between men or women behind their fans at the ball."1 Even though de Marsay is a corrupt aristocrat, his sentiments are little different from those the narrator expresses in the book's opening chapter, a panoptic survey of Parisian life as a glorious mosaic of infection, rot, and moral disease.In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's new tenant Lockwood breaks his self-imposed exile from social life by pressing the housekeeper Nellie Dean to do what housekeepers do best and launch into an aggrieved saga about her master's family. He wants her to serve up the gossip hot. "I ate..., hoping sincerely she would prove a regular gossip, and either rouse me to animation, or lull me to sleep... (shrink)

Some original forms of state emerge from the clan structures in central Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries, beyond the reach of any European influence. The oral epic traditions which echo these events draw from the founts of Bantu mythic thought. The Luba national epic recounts the dramatic origin of its sacred royalty and describes the passage from a primitive culture to a refined civilization, from an uneventful history to one full of movement; but above all it abandons itself (...) to a singular meditation on the ritual usage of fire, on family and death, on time and space, on the rainbow and lightning. If we take the fantastic seriously, symbolic patterns appear which filter the historical tradition and transform it into metaphysics. The reeling King Woot seems to play in reverse the Luba role, on the royal scene of Kuba mythology, where almost Biblical figures could be recognized: the tower of Babel throws its shadow on the adventures of an African Noah who first abandons himself to drunkenness, then to incest, delivering society to the diversity of languages and plunging the universe into primordial chaos. A transition between the myth and the tale, the founding epic of the Lunda state is bathed three times in blood: the blood of the warriors, of the women, and of the beasts who fall prey to a marvelously seductive hunter. Looking closely, we see that this Prince-stranger, initiator of a line of anointed royalty, carries on his shoulders, as does his Luba counterpart, a part of the universe. The cosmogony is veiled in the myth but transparent in the ritual, in the actions and mysterious words of the initiates into mungonge religious society: men with eyes of light are the counterpart of animals with eyes of darkness, as the star of day is opposed to the sinister hyena-moon. The founding epic of the Bemba state tells, like the Kuba myth, of the fascination of the principle of pleasure among a migrating aristocracy, somewhat decadent in comparison with the rude warrior or hunter heroes in the Luba and Lunda epics. But all these narratives, in the final analysis, form one sole myth, which develops its autonomous structures under the turbulence of an historical adventure each time different. More than unfolding the particular story of each kingdom, these legendary chronicles of Zaïre, Zambia and Angola reveal that the powerful political organisations set up by the Bantu to the south of the great forest are not isolated from eacb other: they administrate in common an intellectual patrimony which breaks loose from the ideological role that the kings, whether drunk on palm wine or on military ambition, try to make them play for their own glory: myths and rites obey their own codes, recognize no master but one, which they give themselves in their own kingdom: the Imaginary. The text which follows here is concerned in particular with the epic of the Bemba people, whose dominating aristocracy imposed an anointed royalty on some 100,000 people formerly grouped in matrilinear clans. (shrink)

Yah boo sucks to the grammer wot we lernt in skool! Grammar (and the bad old traditional logic) says that quantifier phrases such as 'nobody', 'everyone', 'all women', 'some men' and 'a man' are in the same category as names such as 'Milly', 'Molly' and 'Mandy'. So, prior to their first corrective lessons, students are awfully muddled, the first and fundamental problem being the Woozle hunt for somebody called 'nobody'. Hoorah for modern logic and logic teachers! The story used (...) to justify our current logics is entirely fictional. The claims about names and quantifier phrases in English are wildly false. Two of the heroes of modern logic, Russell and Hilbert, make the very mistakes which are falsely blamed on traditional logic. The villain, Meinong, turns out to have been working a different patch. Ideas ascribed to traditional grammar are modern inventions. Neither logicians nor grammarians can be trusted to tell the history of either grammar or logic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 296-311 [Access article in PDF] Byron As Cad Ian Jobling I AS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT and intriguing poets of the romantic period, Byron has been the subject of much recent critical commentary. However, no matter how excellent some of this scholarship is, the reader who is familiar with evolutionary psychology, the science that has tried to explain the biological underpinnings of human (...) nature, inevitably comes away from it with a feeling of dissatisfaction. In spite of the obvious relevance of biological theories of human behavior to the most basic issues of literary interpretation, only a handful of literary critics, and no Byron critics, have attempted to use these theories to understand the creation and reception of literary texts. All literary criticism relies on assumptions about human nature; because most critics are unfamiliar with evolutionary psychology, these assumptions are almost never clarified and justified. By familiarizing themselves with evolutionary psychology, literary critics can replace their vague, commonsensical, and often empirically unsupported assumptions about human nature with more precise and empirically valid theories.Much recent research on the evolution of sexuality has focused on "cad" and "dad" mating strategies in men. Cads seek to maximize their reproductive success by maximizing the number of their sexual partners and by avoiding parental investment; dads are committed to long-term, monogamous relationships with women and make substantial parental investment in their children. The personality traits of cads—aggressiveness, rebelliousness, criminality, and sexual promiscuity—bear a close resemblance both to Byron's own personality traits and to those of the Byronic hero. Understanding the cad mating strategy [End Page 296] enables us to better understand Byron's personality as well as the conflicts between his personality and the culture of his time that shaped his literary production and reception. II Evolutionary psychology uses the principles of evolutionary biology as a guide to the study of human cognition and behavior. The types of psychological traits that will succeed evolutionarily are those that maximize an organism's ability to transmit its genes to the next generation, or what evolutionary psychologists call its "fitness," by successfully reproducing and by helping kin who share its genes to reproduce. Our psychological design did not evolve in the environment that we now inhabit but on the African savannah of the Pleistocene era; therefore, evolved human psychology is best understood not in relation to the lifestyle of the citizens of modern nation-states, but to that of hunter-gatherers. 1Recent research on human sexuality has suggested that humans have evolved to pursue two different types of mating strategies: short-term and long-term. On the one hand, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that, unlike most mammals, humans are designed for long-term sexual relationships with substantial male parental investment in children. Human infants require a great deal of parental care, and children reared in father-absent households suffer much higher mortality rates than those who are reared in father-present households, especially in preindustrial societies. 2 The sexual psychology of women also indicates that human sexuality has been shaped by long-term sexual relationships. A number of studies both in the United States and across cultures have shown that women regularly report being attracted to men who are socially respected, financially well-off, ambitious, industrious, dependable, emotionally stable, and romantic, 3 all qualities that indicate the ability and willingness to sustain long-term, parentally investing relationships with women.However, there are also aspects of both men's and women's sexuality that show that we did not evolve exclusively to pursue long-term mating. The evidence for the importance of short-term mating in human evolution is most obvious in men, who consistently show a marked desire for sexual variety. For example, in a survey, male college students said that they would, on average, like to have six partners in the coming year, and men fantasize about having sex with multiple partners (Buss, [End Page 297] ED, pp. 76-83). The fitness advantage of short-term sexual relationships to men is obvious: men can have more offspring the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reconsidering Buster Keaton’s HeroinesBarbara E. SavedoffIt has become commonplace to acknowledge that art tends to reflect the prejudices and presuppositions of the age in which it is produced. Such acknowledgement can serve not only to place the prejudicial attitudes expressed by artists and authors in their proper context, it can also reassure us that we have avoided the same prejudices, or at least, that we have achieved a greater (...) awareness of and sensitivity to them. But we should not be too easily reassured by these thoughts of our own enlightened progress, for the prejudices that we think we discover in works of art may sometimes be of our own making.Prejudice is, at least in part, a problem of distorted perception. Freeing oneself of prejudice is thus not simply a matter of disposing of false beliefs; it requires new habits of perception—becoming able to see what one could not see before. Since habits of perception can be deeply ingrained, we may find it difficult to recognize their persistence. Therefore even as we attempt to repudiate prejudicial attitudes, we may find ourselves misled by their continuing distortion of our vision. This can lead not only to continuing bias on our part, it can also lead to unwarranted charges of bias against others. For instance, the distorted vision that can pervade our evaluation of people in real life can also pervade our evaluation of characters in films or novels. When this happens, we may unfairly charge the film or novel with the perpetuation of negative stereotypes. There are also other ways in which we may be misled by our own biases. For example, if we expect to find negative stereotypes in the products of a given age, this may lead us to see the stereotypes that we anticipate—whether they are really there or not. The work of art can thus become a mirror of our own prejudices and preconceptions. [End Page 77]This is, I believe, what has occurred with much of the criticism of the portrayal of women in Buster Keaton’s films. Critical essays, commentaries, and even film-schedule blurbs tend either to downplay the strengths of the heroines in his films or brand them unfairly as stupid and incompetent. This unjust characterization of the heroines has become an unquestioned myth planted early in the minds of Keaton’s audiences. For example, some prints of The General contain an “educational” introduction which, among other things, describes Annabelle as yet another one of Keaton’s scatter-brained heroines. 1 The audience is thus primed to see Keaton’s heroines in this light.In my discussion I will expose the gap between the myths surrounding Keaton’s heroines and the actual characterization of those heroines in the films. I will then explore possible explanations for the durability of the myths by looking at whether there is something about Keaton’s films that provokes these prejudicial readings.IKeaton’s short film, The Balloonatic, begins in an amusement park with the hero vainly pursuing one woman after another until he is finally given a black eye by a young woman he has annoyed with his attentions. Discouraged, he wanders over to watch the launching of a hot air balloon, where he is given a pennant to attach to its top. His task completed, he finds himself atop the runaway balloon. When his rash attempt to shoot a bird perched on the balloon brings him rapidly back down to earth, he discovers himself stranded in the wilderness.The hero quickly sets out to adapt to his wilderness environment, but he is thwarted in his efforts by his inexperience and incompetence in the role of outdoorsman. He tries to fish, but when he casts his line, he catches the hook on his pants. He then dams up a stream so that he can pick up the stranded fish, but unbeknownst to him, they fall through a hole in his creel as soon as he puts them in. When he finally does realize what is happening, his dam breaks and he is carried helplessly down stream by the rush of water. Later in the film, we see the hero trying to... (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, (...) at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Carolina Hotchandani 633 Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair Now it happened that Metis was going to have a daughter, and she sat inside Zeus’s head hammering out a helmet and weaving a splendid robe for the coming child. Soon Zeus began to suffer from pounding headaches and cried out in agony. All the gods came running to help him, and skilled Hephaestus grasped his tools and (...) split open his father’s skull. Out sprang Athena, wearing the robe and the helmet, her gray eyes flashing. Thunder roared and the gods stood in awe. —from “Athena,” in D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths, 1962 I’ve never met the doctor who happens to be on call when I go into labor. A sweet-smelling aftershave precedes him into the delivery room. We’re gonna get that baby right out of you, he says, pulling a latex glove over one hand and stretching the opening wide so it snaps back with a loud smack against his wrist. I want those hands nowhere near me. I imagine him coaching little league, tapping his baseball cap to send signals to tiny players in the outfield. He chews gum for the entirety of my labor. After I push with all my might for three and a half hours and the baby has still not moved, he says with a half-wink, Poor thing. You’ll be so sore when this is all over. The baby’s been out of me for a while now, but that man is still inside. I go over what happened again and again, desperate to find the angle through which he exits the scene and stays gone. He sees himself from the outside: a hero who enters the scene in medias res, scenting the room with sweet nectars. He will stop in, introduce himself, smile his neighborly smile, before he sets off on a journey through the hospital. Doors will open, doors to women splayed on beds. Women 634 Carolina Hotchandani writhe; women scream in pain. Some will be monstrous—Scyllas and Charybdises among them. Their wounds will gape. Their wombs will pull against his virile strength. They hold the center of the earth within them; theirs, the blood of the wine-dark sea. Do not waver; do not let their currents steer you. Skate above the dark waters. Wait to come through the door till they quake, till they halve. Stand back till they split in two. Then sew them up, and it’s you, it’s you who’s made them new! Pull that man right out of my head. Let me be Zeus on this hospital bed.... (shrink)

In his second appearance to Aeneas in Aeneid 4 Mercury drives the hero to flee Carthage with a false allegation that Dido is planning an attack, capping his warning with an infamous sententia about the mutability of female emotion. Building on a previous suggestion that Mercury's first speech to Aeneas is modelled on Athena's admonishment of Telemachus at the opening of Odyssey 15, this article proposes that Mercury's second speech as well is modelled on Athena's warning, in which the goddess (...) uses misdirection about Penelope's intentions and a misogynistic gnōmē about the changeability of women's affections to spur Telemachus’ departure from Sparta. After setting out how Virgil divides his imitation of Athena's speech verbally and thematically between Mercury's two speeches, the discussion turns to why both Athena and Mercury adopt these deceptive tactics. The speeches are shown to be culminations of the poets’ similar approaches to creating doubt and foreboding around the queens’ famed capacities for using δόλος. Common features in the ensuing hasty departures of Telemachus and Aeneas further confirm Virgil's use of Odyssey 15 in devising Aeneas’ escape from Carthage. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to take immigration policy as a mirror to rethink globalization beyond states and markets, reflecting on gender inequalities that occur in this context from the case study of Colombian contingent in Spain. It is argued that in relation to the feminization of migration flows in South America, the speech overcirculation is installed on mothers and carers, concealed the existence of migrant workers and citizens. Similarly, the homogenization of migrant women in the categories of (...) victims, heroes or poor, hides the emergence of other dimensions that fall outside these, as indigenous women, sexual minorities, sex workers, refugees, among others, which allows us to warn of the risk associated with the classifications in terms of production of omissions and its possible consequences. In conclusion, it may be advisable to address gender as a strategy to rethink migration while exploring migration as a strategy for analyzing gender inequalities, perhaps through this double look allow us out of platitudes and make visible what certain forms of classification become invisible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:uippraisals from the 'Past THE CLEAREST INTELLECT OF OUR AGEl H UGH MACLENNAN 19°7-199° R cently I have been rereading Bertrand Russell, and in so doing I suddenly realized that lowe to this man a good deal of such happiness as I enjoy. Over the years I had forgotten how great my debt was, but when I reread one of his books which I first read as a student, (...) I understood the extent to which he had liberated me from the psychological sadism of Calvin and Knox, to whom I had been unduly exposed when young. It is probably impossible for anyone entirely to escape once these two have got their hands around his throat, but Russell enabled me to escape a litde. 1 [This essay was recently discovered during the cataloguing for BRACERS of an obscure class of correspondence. Mr. Joseph w. Devine had sent Russell a clipping of the essay's appearance in' the Philadelphia Sunday But/etin, of 15 July 1962. I had long thought, from reading Elspeth Cameron's Hugh MacLennan: a Writers Life (1981), that he showed signs not only of having been influenced by Russell but of being the sOrt of person who is attracted to Russell's way of thinking. A promising tide in the same scholar's bibliography ofMacLennan turned out to be a fuller version of the clipping. "The Clearest Intellect of Our Age" is reprinted from The Montreal Star, 14 July 1962, "Entertainments" sec., p. 5. Russell did influence MacLennan. Neither the Russell Archives nor the inventory of the Maclennan papers at the Universiry of Calgary reveals personal contact berween the rwo. I wish I had asked MacLennan about contacts and influence seventeen years ago, when I sent him an early issue of Russell He commented: ''1 found your journal fascinating and never before had read that beautiful thing Russell wrote in his early days with Whitehead:" He is referring to the essay on the status of women in No.6, now in Papers 12.-Ed.] russell: the Journal ofthe Benrand Russell Archives McMaster Unive..ity Libraty Press noS. 11 (summer 1991): 83-5 ISSN 00,6-01631 84 HUGH MACLENNAN I suppose he really is the greatest man alive, in the sense that his teaching grows and his teaching is good, but it is pointless to argue the point between him and Churchill. It is wonderful, however, that many think he is our greatest man and that he has become an international hero to millions of the thoughtful youth. He must be the first pure logician who ever was that. Until he took his stand against nuclear war, he never appealed to the passions. He lacked the aggressions which youth admires. He never said: "Come live with me and I will be your master"; or, "Follow me and I will purge you of your sins." He had no use for self-sacrifice as such. He simply said, in effect: "Happiness is good. If you desire it, you must be reasonable." As he was intelligent enough to know that anyone who teaches that happiness is good, and teaches how to achieve it, is sute to be considered subversive to a Christian-commercial society, he bore no personal resentment when society persecuted him. The young know, of course, that Russell is now assumed by the experts to be the most important philosopher since Hume, but that is not why they love him. They love him for the sublime civilization of his courage, for his refusal to let an intensely kind nature blunt his respect for truth. They love him because he loves life even in the twentieth century; and they love him most of all because he is engage. And of course they also love the wit which refuses to be made tongue-tied by those who insist that whenever one speaks of sex or religion one must be solemn. Russell's wit is worth the study of any writer. It is based on mathematics, and Russell would agree, I think, with the remark Camillien Houde once made to me when I asked the famous mayor of Montreal how he was always able to make people laugh. Houde replied... (shrink)

Logic in Action/Doron Avital Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide (Napoleon Bonaparte) Introduction -/- This book was born on the battlefield and in nights of secretive special operations all around the Middle East, as well as in the corridors and lecture halls of Western Academia best schools. As a young boy, I was always mesmerized by stories of great men and women of action at fateful cross-roads of decision-making. Then, like as (...) today, I felt the full weight of the moment of truth as it confronts the individual, the man or woman of action, with the imminent necessity to decide. Alongside, as I was climbing up the ladder of education, I found myself just as well captivated by the great intellectual stories of our times, in particular 20th century analytic philosophy and, at its core, the machinery of modern logic. How do then the cool contemplative modes of the philosophical and analytic outlooks, that are better fitting of the philosopher's armchair at the fireplace, hang together with the heat of the battlefield or the angst of the ticking clock of time left to the completion of a daring special operation? Growing up I was pondering exactly that. Not accidently, and in fact as consequence, I have chosen a course in life that challenged me to visit the poles of both theory and practice. I set myself on a mission to unravel the tension between the contemplative inquiry, supposedly theoretical, aiming at the logical structure of things, and the uncompromising test of life and action. The puzzle of the gap between theory and practice has become ever since the guiding question of my life. -/- Not long ago, I met two friends, Avner Shor, a veteran combat soldier of the special forces unit I eventually commanded, and Aviram Halevi, a fellow officer with whom I served. Why will we not put into writing the ideas that guided us during our years of military action, we wondered. At that time, I used to deliver the keynote lectures to the senior officers' course of Israel central intelligence organization, the Mossad. For this I already had to put some of these ideas in writing. Avner was quick to introduce me with a notable publisher and even helped me write the first chapter. With Aviram I sat to many meetings, where he would challenge me with key questions, and we followed them with memories of operations and battles, aiming to draw the required lessons. This served me well when I finally sat down to write the first draft of the book. The result was more extensive than me and my friends had expected. I had to add a particularly long chapter dealing with the story of modern philosophy and logic. This was required, I felt, as no decision-making process lives in an intellectual vacuum. Knowingly or subconsciously, the intellectual climate of the time guides us for better or worse with the decisions we finally take. The initial draft was naturally cumbersome and inaccessible. But here I had the privilege of meeting a particularly talented editor, Rami Rothholtz. I found in Rami both an editor and a critical reader. As an infantry combat soldier at youth and now a senior journalist and editor, Rami insisted on simplifying and refining my ideas. Had it not been for his work, this book would have been literally unreadable. *** I opened my book with a brief description of a single night of a special operation deep at the Lebanon Bekaa valley, far away from Israel northern border. The mission was to kidnap a senior terror leader known to be holding in captivity an Israeli pilot. This was also the last special operation I commanded in my military career. A single special operation night, but what had to precede it? For sure, many months of intense and skillful preparations. What is Planning? This is the question with which I open up chapter (2) of the book. I confront in this chapter two approaches to planning. The first is the one I saw as a mission to myself to cultivate in my many years of military service. The second is the one I saw as representing a deep-rooted fallacy that holds a firm grip on today's conventional wisdom about planning. To further examine the logic of the competing models, I was required in chapter (3) to analyze the concept of "The Standard". I argue that the false model of planning has its roots in an attitude of an uncompromising adherence to the power of literal obedience to standards and rules. The standard, or what is outlined by a rule as prescribing a future course of action, is seen as an answer to the fundamental tension between theory (planning) and practice (execution). I argue in contrast that the standard does not produce an answer but rather what I call: "A Well-Defined Question". In essence, it is a meticulously-well-planned invitation to exercise a fresh judgment. A judgement that has as an anchor the default answer that the standard produces but is open to extension as it confronts the new frame of reference of the test of reality. In chapter (4), I present a new tool for planning and execution: "The Polygon of Risks" or "The Polygon of Execution". The Polygon is a geometric illustration of the underlying tension that exists between all dimensions of the operational project. The construction and conceptualization of the trade-offs that exist between the various dimensions - segments of the polygon - is the first topic on the planner's agenda. I position the concepts of "Daring" and "Taking Proactive and Well-Informed Risks" as necessary logical constituents of the polygon and show how in contrast the false model of planning is responsible for an operational culture that is risk-averse. It encourages, in fact, the piling up of false securities at the segments' level that eventually lead to the collapse of the polygon. The necessary trade-offs relationships that exist between the segments of the polygon express the fundamental tension between partnership and competition: partnership in a joint goal and competition over resources, both material and abstract. When this tension is not managed well, that is, when the players' local optimizations overshadow the global optimization required for the success of the project, the execution polygon collapses. In this scenario, we may find the setting of the bar of "High Standards" in a players' spheres of responsibility to conceal a hidden agenda of personal insurances taken against a possible failure. Once the overall risk is not mitigated by way of collaborative joint executional dialogue, the process that leads to a collapse of the polygon is literally unstoppable. *** In chapter (5), I discuss "(Fateful) Decisions". I examine the way in which we should translate the polygon into sequential critical decisions on the timeline. The execution polygon is not a rigid scaffolding but a dynamic conceptual illustration of the -/- project. It will need now to be converted into successive decision junctions. We will find the content of a decision and its timing on the timeline to be inseparable. The right decision is the one that is taken at the right time. The moment of decision is in fact the last moment of deliberation, the first moment available for action, i.e. the first possible "Can" is also the latest possible "Must". Deciding too soon is analog to the "Jumping of the Gun". The decision maker is forcing a pre-conceived answer to a state of affairs not ripe for an answer, e.g. the target in the shooting range is not yet erected. Late to decide and the decision maker may envision what he or she should have done but reality is no longer available for them to harness it right, e.g. consider a tennis player's frustration when reviewing a too-late-to-react move in the video replay. I review in this chapter many fateful decisions, both historical, from Napoleon's Waterloo, to a Bridge Too Far of WWII, to the failed rescue attempt of American hostages at the time of the Iranian Revolution, as well as fateful decisions I had to take in the course of my military life, both in combat and in special operations, and show the sense in which they all answer to our analysis. The theme of chapter (6) is "The Moment of Truth". This is the moment when everything is on the line and from which there is no turning back. I discuss the formative repetitive structure of the schooling and simulation phase and contrast it with the "One Shot, One Opportunity" nature of the moment of truth. This is extremely helpful when we analyze the logical structure of failures as unwarranted repetitions of past lessons. The schooling curriculum indeed consists of important abstractions drawn from lessons of the past. However, it is when we project them in a fashion that is literal or mechanical that we cross path with the possibility of a failure. The paradox of education is that what we must repeat in school and simulation must be extended and not repeated in real life. What is required of us so we do not fall into the fallacy of repetition in face of the moment of truth is the core subject of the discussion of this chapter. In chapter (7), I took a lengthy philosophical detour surveying the intellectual drama of modern logic, and in general, the story of 20th century analytic philosophy. Readers who choose to bypass the somehow demanding narrative of this drama can do so and still keep the argumentative thread of the book. However, even by way of skipping the more technical parts, I would still urge the readers to delve into the discussion in this chapter as I believe this would grant them a deeper understanding of the overall conceptual framework. I explore here the work of two key figures: the logician Kurt Gödel and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, both were crowned in 2000 by TIME Magazine, as the leading Logician and Philosopher, respectively, of the 20th Century. I review the fascinating logical result of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and examine its relevance as setting a theoretical limit to the power of formalization. This amazing logical result - a result that shakes the logical foundations of 20th century thought in as much as the discovery of irrational numbers shook the foundations of the Pythagorean program of the ancient Greeks - bears significantly on the question of action and the blind trust we place in the power of formalization in the form of protocols and rules. It is here that Wittgenstein's philosophy enters in full force. We follow Wittgenstein as he dismantles our conception of rules as if there were "Railroads to Infinite", i.e. as prescribing for us in-advance their proper employments in all possible -/- future eventualities. Instead we propose that the dilemma of action demands of us an extension of rules rather than a mechanical or blind repetition of their literal imperative. In turn, this extension can serve as a new lesson added to the curriculum of school and simulation. The theme of chapter (8), the concluding chapter, is Strategy, Logic, and Ethics. The chapter comes to place the ethical dilemma in the conceptual map we presented in the book. I discuss here the tension between strategy as a process of setting goals and deriving backward as it were the steps that are necessary for achieving these goals, to the inescapable dictation of the ethical imperative. This unavoidable tension is particularly important against the backdrop of contemporary culture that is guided by a vision of personal success and achievement that may threaten our ability to do what is right. Most of all, I am troubled in this chapter, with the role logic may play, first as a liberating force enabling a change that is tuned to the ethical imperative, and second, as a force designed to justify on logical grounds, as it were, the existing power structure. It is in this junction that brave individuals will be called to challenge the governing logic of the zeitgeist - logic that operates now as an oppressive force that serves the vested interest of beneficials of the existing order. When success is favored over doing what is right, as we must admit is the prevailing cultural mood of our times, that the words of Emanuel Kant carry their full weight: "Do the Right thing and leave the Consequences to God". For this we need heroes and heroines that challenge the time by bearing the full weight of responsibility that comes with the doing of what is Right. *** This book was written more than anything from the perspective of the heroes and heroines of action. Sometimes they may be missing the exact words or the full insight into the solid logical complexity that stands between them and the doing of what is right. They feel what is right to do on the battlefield of life, whether in real battle, in political or economic life or whether in the life of creativity and the quest of the intellect. They do need, in analogy, proper logical and intellectual artillery. I hope they will find the logical cannons they require as they travel through the pages of this book. The rest is in their hands at the Moment of Truth. -/- Doron Avital, Tel Aviv 2011 -/- . (shrink)

Although Aeschylus' Oresteia moves toward resolution on many fronts, there are significant counterpoints to these positive progressions. Human stature and initiative decline over the course of the trilogy; the "hero"of the final play is largely passive, with speech and action increasingly the province of the gods; Orestes' "initiation" in Eumenides remains incomplete; and the trilogy ends with not just "uppity" women put in their place but the capacity for human greatness itself reduced. These and other contrapuntal undercurrents complicate and (...) enrich our response to the many resolutions that do occur in the final play of the trilogy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comic RomanceBenjamin La FargeIOn the surface, it would seem that nothing could be more different from comedy than romance. Comedy deflates, romance inflates. Comedy is realistic, romance fantastical. Comedy reduces, romance elevates. Comedy is democratic, romance heroic. Yet there are underlying similarities. Both involve a conflict between destructive and restorative impulses. In both, appearances are typically mistaken for reality, and both end happily. Above all, both are governed by (...) a structure of illogical logic that generates laughter in one and fantasy in the other.The generic differences between comedy and romance are crucial to a proper understanding of their functions. Comedy celebrates the renewal of life, the relation of man to woman and of man to man, in a spirit of tolerant acceptance, while romance celebrates a narcissistic dream of the self. If the former is best enjoyed in a crowded theater, the latter is usually enjoyed in solitude. Romance is a fiction of wish fulfillment. Since wishful thinking is generally understood as childish, romance is often regarded as a poor cousin among literary genres, haughtily dismissed by highbrows who associate it with the infantile pleasures of their childhood reading and with lowbrow fiction in general. This is precisely why so many sophisticated readers are reluctant to grant science fiction and other forms of fantasy any enduring literary value. In their view the pleasures of such works can not be taken seriously.Yet those childhood pleasures have a lasting appeal that lingers in the mind of every adult. There must be few grown readers who do not harbor a special fondness for the first heroes and heroines they encountered in their favorite childhood stories. Many of those heroes possess [End Page 18] some magical power; and when they place that power in the service of justice, especially the justice of revenge, their appeal is irresistible. I have seen grown men, armed and dressed for battle, avidly reading Superman comics. What stirred them, as it stirred many educated men and women in their childhood, was the spectacle of an omnipotent hero fighting to overcome the wrongs of this world.Even if our sentimental memory of these heroic figures is nothing more than nostalgia for irrecoverable pleasures, their initial impact may be seen as having a formative influence on a child's expectations, as many commentators have thought. In either case, they are all descended from a venerable tradition of literary figures. Superman himself is a direct descendant of Sherlock Holmes, who comes from a long line of English heroes going back to Robin Hood and Merlin, each of whom is involved in righting some injustice. Ultimately, all of them are descended from Odysseus, who reclaimed his rightful kingdom, after an absence of twenty years, by murdering his wife's suitors.Romance, like comedy, is a conflict between destructive and restorative impulses, and these impulses are embodied in the characters that inhabit this dream fiction.1 Like comic characters, the characters of romance evoke in us the same responses of wish and fear, and like comedy itself romance builds toward a catharsis of those two emotions. To achieve that catharsis, romance requires our "willing suspension of disbelief" (as Coleridge put it so memorably), which we have no difficulty in granting, provided only that the story is skillfully told. What we want from romance is the fulfillment of the wishes it arouses; what we get from their fulfillment is the pleasure of story-for-the-sake-of-story. It is this pleasure, in fact, that constitutes the basic, generic purpose of romance.The difference between the two genres, however, can be seen in the kinds of wish and fear they evoke in us, for unlike comedy the feelings of wish and fear evoked by romance are uncomplicated by ambivalence. We may wish to experience the destructive impulse vicariously through the protagonist, but only in order to see him triumph in the end. We are so entirely sympathetic to his enterprise that we cannot possibly wish for his destruction. If he is destroyed, as in the case of Tristan, the hero of the eponymous medieval romance, we are forced to recognize that the love potion he drank with Isolde was his... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Elizabethan Bacchae STEPHEN ORGEL Euripides’s Bacchae, with its antic hero and celebration of the joys of revenge, would seem to be especially relevant to Elizabethan drama, an ancestor of The Spanish Tragedy or Hamlet. In fact, however, it seems to have been practically unknown to the Elizabethans. With the new ProQuest version of EEBO (Early English Books Online) it is now possible to search early English books for (...) specific references; so I paired the name Euripides with books printed in England before 1640 to see what came up. I got 474 hits. Many of these, of course, were duplicates, appearing in works that were issued in multiple editions—the actual figure, however, was still something over three hundred. Most of those, however, were cases in which Euripides’s name simply appears in a list of famous ancient authors. Citations which actually quoted Euripides for the most part indicated no knowledge of the work cited, but were only bits of wisdom that might have come from any of the multitude of collections of aphorisms and moral stories throughout the period. There was only one English edition of a play of Euripides in Greek, The Trojan Women, published by John Day in 1575— continental editions were, of course, easily obtainable, but it must be to the point that English publishers did not see a sufficient market to produce them domestically; and there were no subsequent editions of Day’s Trojan Women. As for The Bacchae, I found only a single case where I believe it is being cited, and in a context, moreover, that indicates some familiarity with the play. John Bishop’s Beautiful Blossoms, a collection of historical anecdotes published in 1577, recounting the history of Demetrius, king of Macedonia, says, “Then fled Demetrius unto Thebes, where one scoffingly applied vnto him that verse arion 28.3 winter 2021 64 the elizabethan bacchae of Euripides: he came vnto the Dyrcean springs, and Ismenus, his divine and goodly fourme and shape being chaunged in to a mortall.”1 This is a version of a bit of Dionysus’s opening speech, I am here at the springs of Dirce, the river Ismenos, Changing my shape from divine to mortal... There is no reason to assume that John Bishop (about whom I can learn nothing) knew the play, but he is certainly citing someone who did. The play, then, to the Elizabethans was either practically unknown or deliberately ignored. It was not translated into English until the 1780s, and then two translations were published within a year of each other—for the English, it was an enlightenment and romantic text. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (delivered 1806, published 1846) and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) were the works that established The Bacchae as the quintessential Greek tragedy, though for Nietzsche, ironically, the two destroyers of the Greek tragic sense, the two great cultural villains, were Euripides the ironist and Socrates the arch-rationalist. But Nietzsche sees Euripides, at the end of his life, having a major change of heart, realizing that Dionysus was simply too powerful to be expunged from art and society; and The Bacchae was thus the fullest expression of this tragic truth. The problems with this argument are manifold: Euripides the ironist is quite evident in The Bacchae, so it hardly represents a change of heart; and the claims of the irrational are fully present in his earlier plays, for example, in Hippolytus, where all the poetic energy is in expressing the uncontrollable violence of passion, and the virtues of morality and self-control are meagre indeed. The essay was soundly refuted in its own time, and Nietzsche withdrew and recanted it. Its celebrity is a modern phenomenon: whatever its historical defects, it speaks to the dangerous attractions of unreason. There is a perverse element in Nietzsche’s argument, too: Dionysus, as the embodiment of revelry, is surely as essential Stephen Orgel 65 to comedy as to tragedy; and one could press this further. At the end of The Symposium, Socrates tells Agathon and Aristophanes, tragic and comic dramatists, that their arts (or crafts: the word is techne) are essentially the same. Heavy weather has... (shrink)

The German poet Barbara Köhler's 2007 poem-cycle Niemands Frau [Nobody's Wife] is more than a feminist response to Homer's Odyssey. In shifting the focus from the escapades of the hero Odysseus to the web of women characters that populates Homer's epic poem – Nausicaa, Circe, the Sirens, Helen, Ino Leucothea, the shades of the dead women whom Odysseus meets in Hades, and “Nobody’s wife” Penelope – Köhler also undertakes a grammatical shift: from the masculine singular pronoun “er” to (...) the polyvalent pronoun “sie” that denotes the feminine singular, the gender-unmarked plural and the formal “you.” “Sie” acts as the “quantum linguistic particle” that transports the reader from a world analogous to that conceived by Newtonian physics into a quantum universe of plural probabilities. Köhler's work explores the difference in power dynamics that results from this transformation, generating intriguing ways of reconceiving subjectivity, relationality, rationality, and authorship. Taken at their word, the poems open up a prospect of no longer insisting on the sovereign individual subject and his linear modes of narration, inheritance, calculation and grammatical proposition. (shrink)

Two widely shared but diametrically opposed views inform what theories we have on the everyday: one, which we might call the feminine or feminist, though it is not necessarily held by women or self-described feminists, links the everyday with the daily rituals of private life carried out within the domestic sphere traditionally presided over by women; the other, the masculine or masculinist, sites the everyday in the public spaces and spheres dominated especially, but not exclusively, in modern Western (...) bourgeois societies by men. According to the one, the everyday is made up of the countless repetitive gestures and small practices that fall under the heading of what the existentialists called the contingent. According to the other, the everyday is made up of the chance encounters of the streets; its hero is not the housewife but the flâneur. In the word of Maurice Blanchot:The everyday is human. The earth, the sea, forest, light, night, do not represent everydayness, which belongs first of all to the dense presence of great urban centers. We need these admirable deserts that are the world’s cities for the experience of the everyday to begin to overtake us. The everyday is not at home in our dwelling-places, it is not in offices or churches, any more than in libraries or museums. It is in the street—if it is anywhere.1 1. Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” trans. Susan Hanson, in “Everyday Life,” ed. Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, special issue of Yale French Studies, no. 73 : 17. Naomi Schor is the William Hanes Wannamaker Professor Romance Studies at Duke University and coeditor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Her most recent book is Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine . She is currently completing a book entitled George Sand and Idealism. (shrink)

Professor Vickers extracts two or three sentences out of a long article I wrote on a completely different topic and misreads them, attributing to me statements I never made and positions I have explicitly argued against. When Francis Bacon used the metaphor of rape to refer to the Baconian natural philosopher's relationship to nature, which he did relatively infrequently, he invoked the classical, "heroic" sense of rape as the act whereby gods and heroes found dynasties and empires, as in (...) the rape of the Sabine women, the rape of Europa, and the rape of the daughters of Leucippus. (shrink)

Lecture 1. What is intellectual history? -- Lecture 2. The scientific origins of the Enlightenment -- Lecture 3. The emergence of the modern intellectual -- Lecture 4. The cultural meaning of the French Revolution -- Lecture 5. The new conservatism in post-revolutionary Europe -- Lecture 6. The new German philosophy -- Lecture 7. Hegel's philosophical conception of history -- Lecture 8. The new liberalism -- Lecture 9. The literary culture of Romanticism -- Lecture 10. The meaning of the romantic hero (...) -- Lecture 11. The Industrial Revolution and classical economics -- Lecture 12. Early critiques of industrial capitalism -- Lecture 13. Hegelianism and the young Marx -- Lecture 14. Marx's social critique -- Lecture 15. Feminism in the 19th century culture -- Lecture 16. Women's rights in a man's world -- Lecture 17. Tocqueville & Mill, rethinking liberal theory -- Lecture 18. Nationalisms and national identities -- Lecture 19. The novel as art and social criticism -- Lecture 20. Science and its literary critics -- Lecture 21. Charles Darwin and the new biology -- Lecture 22. Controversies of social Darwinism -- Lecture 23. The heroic critic in mass society -- Lecture 24. Nietzsche's critique of European culture. (shrink)

Sport, in modern times, finds its roots in the mythological sources of ancient Greece, where it was born as a sacred game to be performed in the honour of Zeus in Olympia or of other gods elsewhere during the Panhellenic games. Since the beginning of the twentieth century and until the 1970s sport was mythogenic (Barthes 1975). But is sport still mythogenic in the twenty-first century? Our analysis attempts to answer two questions: (i) what has been the influence of doping (...) and sponsorship on contemporary sport; and (ii) how (if at all) have both influenced the symbolic contemporary forms of the sportsman/woman myth. We argue that modern sport has become increasingly dependent upon the industrial and entertainment worlds, thus losing along the way the imprinting of symbolic innocence that the myth conferred in the recent past. Moreover, the contemporary perception of sportsmen/women by the general public has changed in so far as it concerns the symbolic aspect of the performer. If their function as social link appears to be intact, sportsmen seem to have lost the classical Olympic symbolism that was generally accepted among spectators until a few decades ago. It does not appear that the mythical aura of sport has been lost but rather the symbols that it has previously carried. Popular admiration is nowadays more concentrated on the sportsman's capacity to acquire fame and fortune by means that appear to be in everybody's reach, including doping. Consequently, the commoner identifies him/her self with the sportsman/woman but does not see him/her any longer as a hero carrying classical moral values. (shrink)

I consider Sophocles’s tragedy the Ajax against the backdrop of Pericles’s invocation of silence about and from women, Pericles’s citizenship law of 451BCE and Aristotle’s understanding of the human being as a political animal possessing logos. I argue that in the actions and speeches of the play there is a questioning of the exclusion of women and bastards from political deliberation. A study of the language of the play reveals that Tecmessa, Ajax’s concubine, and Teucer, his bastard half-brother, (...) exercise logos while the Homeric hero Ajax consistently resorts to the sort of sounds used by animals that give voice to pain. The dismissal of the speech of women and those from the lower ranks of society proves detrimental to the lives of those who choose to silence them. (shrink)

Honor has been an indispensable reference in the life of individuals and societies throughout the course of human history. As a basic concern of men and women, the phenomenon already appears in the earliest literary testimonies. The heroes of the Greek, Roman or German epic poems adapt their behavior to the demands of this particular deity, honor. Literature, at any time, in any culture, in any language, makes constant use of honor as an effective dramatic element. The recurrent (...) presence is certainly a reflection of the actual significance the phenomenon of honor had in everyone’s life. This essay clarifies why honor is given such importance; why it has been considered to be more valuable for the individual than his/her own life. To this end, the mention of public opinion is unavoidable. This phenomenon, in its social psychological conception, is the key that permits us to enlighten the labyrinth of honor. (shrink)

Two humanist, critical approaches—those of Dorothy Dinnerstein and Immanuel Kant—are summarized, compared, and employed to critique gender bias in science education. The value of Dinnerstein’s approach lies in her way of seeing conventional “masculinity” and conventional “femininity” as developing in relation to each other from early childhood. Because of women’s dominance of early childcare and adults’ enduring, sexist resentment of that dominance, women become inhumanely associated with the non-adult qualities of immaturity, dependence, and childish vulnerability and punish-ability; and (...) male human beings—to whom woman-resenting convention assigns the impossible task of absolutely triumphing over “the feminine,” childhood experience, and all human vulnerability—become inhumanely held to unachievable standards of super-hero invulnerability and god-like mental and practical infallibility. The value of Kant’s approach lies in his insistence that our sense of what is right and necessary for social progress must arise in a practically engaged and experientially full manner, rather than (1) from concepts (such as rigid ideological prescriptions) conceived as being detached from sense experience and as arising from an otherworldly, divine or quasi-divine realm of moral infallibility (such concepts being conventionally associated with “masculine” authority and leadership), or (2) from a sense of being trapped in what—in a given historical, cultural, or experiential moment—may appear as an absolute and unchangeable reality of embodied human experience (an anti-critical, anti-intellectual, and anti-progressive sense of things often associated with disempowered “feminine” experience). I demonstrate that critique integrating these approaches is useful in a science education setting. (shrink)

The need for increased civility has been a recurring theme in conversations about lawyer professionalism in the United States and Canada over the last several decades. In addition to having many advocates, however, the civility movement has also been subject to criticism. In large part, the critiques made to date have focused on the problems or risks created when civility rules or guidelines are enforced against lawyers. This article takes a different focus to provide a complementary, yet distinct critique. The (...) object of analysis is the discourse of the civility movement. More specifically, the assumptions and concepts of lawyer professionalism embedded in our conversations about civility are explored. Upon review, the discourse of the civility movement reveals a dominant narrative framed in terms of competing masculinities: the aggressive, testosterone fuelled Rambo-lawyer is cast as the anti-hero to be vanquished against renewed calls for the return of the gentlemanly Atticus Finch. I argue that this 'Rambo-Finch narrative' is hostile to inclusive understandings of lawyer professionalism in three inter-related ways: (1) it renders women and other 'outsider' lawyers largely invisible; (2) it romanticizes past discriminatory concepts of lawyer professionalism; and (3) it reflects anxieties about the destabilization of traditional, exclusionary claims or modes of authority in the legal profession. The exclusionary understandings of lawyer professionalism contained in the Rambo-Finch narrative should be of concern to those interested with improving gender equity and diversity in the legal profession as there is good reason to believe that this discourse translates into 'real world' consequences in how 'outsider' lawyers are viewed and treated within the legal profession. (shrink)

In recent years, online “involuntary celibate” or “incel” communities have been linked to various deadly attacks targeting women. Why do these men react to romantic rejection with not just disappointment, but murderous rage? Feminists have claimed this is because incels desire women as objects or, alternatively, because they feel entitled to women’s attention. I argue that both of these explanatory models are insufficient. They fail to account for incels’ distinctive ambivalence toward women—for their oscillation between obsessive (...) desire and violent hatred. I propose instead that what incels want is a Beauvoirian “Other.” For Beauvoir, when men conceive of women as Others, they represent them as simultaneously human subjects and embodiments of the natural world. Women function then as sui generis entities through which men can experience themselves as praiseworthy heroes, regardless of the quality of their actions. I go on to give an illustrative analysis of Elliot Rodger’s autobiographical manifesto, “My Twisted World.” I show how this Beauvoirian model sheds light on Rodger’s racist and classist attitudes and gives us a better understanding of his ambivalence toward women. It therefore constitutes a powerful and overlooked theoretical alternative to accounts centered on objectification and entitlement. (shrink)

Honor has been an indispensable reference in the life of individuals and societies throughout the course of human history. As a basic concern of men and women, the phenomenon already appears in the earliest literary testimonies. The heroes of the Greek, Roman or German epic poems adapt their behavior to the demands of this particular deity, honor. Literature, at any time, in any culture, in any language, makes constant use of honor as an effective dramatic element. The recurrent (...) presence is certainly a reflection of the actual significance the phenomenon of honor had in everyone’s life. This essay clarifies why honor is given such importance; why it has been considered to be more valuable for the individual than his/her own life. To this end, the mention of public opinion is unavoidable. This phenomenon, in its social psychological conception, is the key that permits us to enlighten the labyrinth of honor. (shrink)

The research is based on a study of short story collections by Israeli writer Ida Fink’s, All the Stories, and French writer Charlotte Delbo’s, Auschwitz and After, to reflect the impact of the Holocaust on autobiographical elements in their work. The authors are representatives of the first generation of Holocaust survivors, which means that the mass systematic genocide during World War II was a personal traumatic experience for them. The works of female writers are studied using the theory of trauma (...) at the genre level. Since autobiography has been considered a documentary genre with its own peculiarities, works about the Holocaust were seen as historical evidence of this event. However, based on the works of Juri Lotman and some principles of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact”, we can conclude that autobiography is similar to fiction if it can meet certain aesthetic functions. Under the influence of trauma, the genre of autobiography can be modified in the literary text in such a way that the line between autobiography and fiction is blurred. Ida Fink and Charlotte Delbo write short stories with fictional narrators, but all the situations are certainly the experiences of the writers themselves, who turn to the autofiction and conventions of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” to transfer their memories to literary heroes. The aim of the study is to define the peculiarities of the autobiographical genre, analyze its functions in Holocaust literature, identify poetic elements of autobiography, and prove that there is no canonical form of narration about the Holocaust-Era, as the writers were searching for how to articulate their traumatic experience in experimental forms. (shrink)

Content analysis of 291 cop action films reveals the gendering of heroism by Hollywood filmmakers. Employing Griswold's “cultural diamond” framework, this study frames the genre as product of a Hollywood labor market dominated by men but increasingly integrated. Women among its heroes continue disproportionately to be rookies and to work a narrow range of cases involving undercover operations and the detection of serial killers. Women in cop action films are also more likely than men to begin heterosexual (...) affairs and to arrest or kill their lovers. However, they engage in less combat and do not confront or engage in police corruption. The most aggressive uses of and contest over state power thus turn out to be men's work in these films. The genre implies a collective common sense among industry professionals about the limits of men's professional ethics and women's professional achievements. (shrink)

What is the relevance of morality today? Eden Collinsworth enlists the famous, the infamous, and the heretofore unheard-of to unravel how we make moral choices in an increasingly complex and ethically flexible age. To call these unsettling times is an understatement: our political leaders are less and less respectable; in the realm of business, cheating, lying, and stealing are hazily defined; and in daily life, rapidly changing technology offers permission to act in ways inconceivable without it. Yet somehow, this hasn (...) t quite led to a complete free-for-all people still draw lines around what is acceptable and what is not. Collinsworth sets out to understand how and why. In her intrepid quest, she squares off witha prime minister, the editor of London s Financial Times, a holocaust survivor, a pop star, and a former commander of the U.S. Air Force to grapple with the impracticality of applying morals to foreign policy; precisely when morality gets lost in the making of money; what happens to morality without free will; whether immoral women are just those having a better time; why celebrities have become the new moral standard-bearers; and if testosterone is morality s enemy or its hero.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophocles’s Enemy Sisters: Antigone and IsmeneWm. Blake Tyrrell (bio) and Larry J. BennettAt the core of the Oedipus myth, as Sophocles presents it, is the proposition that all masculine relationships are based on reciprocal acts of violence. Laius, taking his cue from the oracle, violently rejects Oedipus out of fear that his son will seize his throne and invade his conjugal bed. Oedipus, taking his cue from the oracle, (...) does away with Laius, violently rebuffs the sphinx, then takes their places—as king and “scourge of the city,” respectively. Again, Oedipus, taking his cue from the oracle, plots the death of that unknown figure who may be seeking to usurp his own position. Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias, each taking his cue from the oracle, seek one another’s downfall.All these acts of violence gradually wear away the differences that exist not only in the same family but throughout the community.—René Girard, Violence and the SacredRené Girard does not include feminine relationships in his assessment of the Oedipus myth, yet the same redundancy that characterizes the males marks the females.1 Jocasta conjoins in one person multiple and redundant social roles: she is the mother and wife of the same person, for which she [End Page 1] hangs herself, leaving for Oedipus “many pains that a mother’s furies fulfilled” (Homer Odyssey 11.279–80). Her daughters, their father’s sisters, manifest kinship redundancy in two persons. Incest produces circularly, reverting to a sibling of the parent rather than moving forward with a descendant. The absence of linear progression from one generation to the next creates a sameness and equilibrium that thwart separation and individuality. Oedipus’s brothers/sons fail in their adult roles, because neither can overcome the other’s right to the throne of Thebes and the mastery of its royal household. They are enemy brothers locked in reciprocal violence.2 Antigone and Ismene have escaped notice not only as enemy sisters but even as products of the same incest. Audiences for Sophocles’s Antigone have viewed them as “normal” women and cooperated with his characters in emphasizing the differences between them. They have assumed from Antigone’s betrothal to Haemon and resistance to Creon that she is the elder, more mature sister.3 They tend to accept without question that Antigone engages in burial rituals with Polyneices’s corpse (241–58) and returns to it (442–35).4 Bernard M. W. Knox’s critically powerful concept of the “Sophoclean hero” has bolstered this view of Antigone while reducing Ismene to a foil, and abetted the tendency of modern producers of the play to cast an older or more famous actress in the role of Antigone.5 Naturalistic readings like that of C. M. Bowra—“seeing that Ismene is her only close relative in the world, Antigone is remarkably cold to her”6—have masked the source and hence the vehemence of Antigone’s fury.That the reciprocity of the violence between Ismene and Antigone has gone unnoticed is understandable in view of the familiarity of the conflict between their brothers. Males in Greek society pursued difference by striving to excel as aristoi (best) in competition for prestige, wealth, and power.7 Whenever Eteocles and Polyneices came together, each asserted a right to Oedipus’s household and throne that was equally matched, and violence ensued from the equilibrium. On the other hand, Greek women were not supposed to compete with one another for distinction. They wove wool for clothes, maintained the household, and cared for the children, the sick, and the dead, activities that required cooperation away from public view.8 Proximity to other women was the norm and desideratum. Moreover, lawgivers like Solon based their funeral legislation on the premise that every woman wanted to participate in mourning.9 For the sake of public tranquillity, legislators tried to limit the numbers of women participants by imposing restrictions according to degrees of kinship, for instance, to children of fifth cousins. In this context, women were interchangeable, and the places they held during birth, coming of age in wedding ceremonies, and death, [End Page 2] were open to more than one woman. Closeness and... (shrink)

This book shows how, during the 20th century, evils such as totalitarianism, tyranny, war, and genocide became indelibly linked to the fascist cause, and examines the enduring and popular appeal of an ideology that has counted princes, poets, and war heroes among its most fervent adherents. From the followers of Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, the Arab leader who met with Adolf Hitler in November 1942 to the murderous death squads of the Croatian Ustasha to certain members of the British Establishment, (...) fascism's heady brew of extreme nationalism and revolutionary violence has attracted followers from across all religions, races, and classes. Now widely reviled, fascism became an immensely powerful political force in Western Europe throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. How did civilized nations like Italy, Germany, Austria, and others succumb to an ideology now regarded by the political mainstream as barbarous and beyond the pale? World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia covers all the key personalities and movements throughout the history of fascism and brings to light some of the ideology's lesser-known aspects, from Hindu extremists in India to the influential role of certain women in fascist movements. How did an ideology which was openly boastful of its belief in violence come to seduce the elites of some of the most civilized nations on earth? What can explain fascism's enduring appeal? (shrink)

In this essay, I explore some key notions in Bonnie Honig's A Feminist Theory of Refusal. Juxtaposing her speculative reading of Euripides' Bacchae to Ursula K Le Guin's essay on the 'Carrier Bag Theory of Storytelling,' I argue that the women in the tragedy can be considered neither as imitating masculine, violent hunter-heroes, nor as surreptiously embodying feminine, caring gatherer-mothers. Following their refusal to care and to think about tomorrow, I conclude by suggesting that a critical fabulation of (...) the women's acts of refusal should steer clear from expecting them to inspire us, as contemporary feminists. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddha Loves Me! This I Know, for the Dharma Tells Me SoDonald K. SwearerI intend no disrespect to either the Buddha or the Christ by my rewrite of Anna Bartlett Warner’s 1859 Sunday school song, “Jesus Loves Me.” That one might construct the Buddha in the image of a loving Jesus may be more startling or offensive to Buddhists (and also to Christians) than the modern, apologetic view of (...) the Buddha as a rational renouncer. Versions of both can be textually justified; however, each is a reification that reflects the bias of the interpreter. Both ignore the complexity of the figure of the Buddha within the varied and diverse traditions of Buddhism. My starting point in the following essay acknowledges this complexity as well as the inevitable limitations of my personal interpretation of the Buddha, necessarily conditioned by my experience. I propose to structure the essay around two polarities—universal/particular and wisdom/compassion—looking first at the Buddha and then briefly reflecting dialogically at the end of each section on the figure of the Christ.Buddha: Universal and ParticularIn my personal experience in Buddhist Asia, especially Thailand, and my studies of Buddhist traditions, in particular the Theravada, I have been impressed by the creative tension between the universal and particular dimensions of the figure of the [End Page 113] Buddha. Even the modern Western view of the Buddha evidences this tension. Typically the word Buddha evokes the story of Prince Siddhattha’s renunciation of his royal status, subsequent quest for enlightenment, and eventual realization of nibbana. 1 In the hands of a comparative mythologist such as Joseph Campbell, the detailed embellishments of the Buddha’s sacred biography are absorbed into the tripartite, monomyth structure of the hero’s narrative—separation, attainment, return. For Campbell, the story of the historical Buddha, Siddhattha Gotama, represents a rite of passage, a deep psychological truth of self-discovery symbolized by other heroes in world mythology. Despite the antistructuralist critique by historical and textual scholars, as well as the feminist criticism that the heroic journey does not reflect women’s experience, in one form or another the Buddha reified as an exemplar of the universal paradigm of the individual’s journey of self-realization continues to capture the Western imagination.A somewhat more sophisticated version of the universal hero motif is the Buddha as ‘rational renouncer,’ an interpretation favored by both Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism who portray the Buddha as an empiricist and pragmatist somewhat on the order of William James. In this view, Prince Siddhattha’s quest was a rational response to the experience of suffering, and the truth he perceived on the night of his enlightenment was nothing more nor less than a direct perception of the universal law of cause and effect obscured to ordinary awareness. De-emphasizing both the ascetical and devotional aspects of the Buddha’s sacred biography, the rational renouncer school of thought places its emphasis on epistemological transformation characterized in Buddhist texts as “seeing things as they really are.”The Buddha as universal hero and as rational renouncer can be critiqued as modernized, rationalized, westernized reifications of the Buddha, an example of the ‘orientialist’ distortion that characterized the colonial project. Charles Hallisey has pointed out that such reconstructions of the Buddha were not merely the products of Western scholars but owed much to Asian Buddhists as well. 2 But are we to assume that throughout the history of Buddhism, similar hermeneutical moves and debates over the nature of the Buddha did not exist? I find a tension in the Buddhist tradition between two contrasting images of the Buddha: as an exemplar of a universal truth, and as a being defined by the contingencies of human particularities.Theravada Buddhists find strong support in the sutta for a humanistic interpretation of the Buddha. In particular, they argue that the Buddha of the early Buddhist canonical texts specifically denied that he was a god, and that he was a teacher of the truth he perceived at his enlightenment. They find support for this view in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, wherein the Buddha tells his followers that when he dies the teaching and the disciplinary rules he... (shrink)