One of the first things people learn about Disney's Mulan is what a clever and resourceful young woman she is, a trait she shares with many Disney princesses. If Mulan fails to cultivate the virtues that correspond to her allotted role in her society, she fears that she might just “uproot the family tree,” not only because she might fail to find a husband and produce some of those highly sought‐after sons, but also because she will disgrace (...) her family name. But to understand how that works, people need first to look at the significance of family in traditional honor‐based cultures and in traditional Chinese thought in particular. The idea of Mulan bringing honor or disgrace to her family through her actions, either matrimonial or military, is hard to square with the individualistic assumptions of modern Western thought. (shrink)

This chapter explains some sort of feminist transformation from Snow White to Moana. There are four waves of feminist philosophy which can help us understand the progressing role of Disney princesses since Snow White's debut in 1937. Disney's three waves of princesses reflect the waves of feminism from which they emerge. In subtle but profound ways, Disney princesses have evolved as each wave of feminism has crashed upon the shores of culture. They shift people's (...) focus from reinforcing patriarchy, to challenging it, and finally turning it on its head, redefining their very understanding of what it means to be feminine and masculine. The implication is that equality is not based on making women and men equal to one another, but rather on making them balanced within themselves. Going forward, people can only imagine what the next batch of Disney princesses will offer. (shrink)

Although Disney films are sometimes denigrated as popular or “low” art forms, this article argues that they often engage deeply with, and thereby communicate, significant moral truths. The capitalistic enterprise of contemporary modern cinema demands that cinematic moral pedagogy be sublimated into non-partisan forms, often by substituting secular proxies for otherwise divine or spiritual components. By adapting Søren Kierkegaard’s tripartite existential anthropology of the self, I analyze the subjective experiences of the protagonists in three recent animated fairy tales—Disney’s (...) Frozen, Moana, and Tangled—to demonstrate how these princess movies bridge the imaginative gap between the mundane and the divine. (shrink)

Walt Disney is largely responsible for popularizing the princess story in American culture. These stories are the centerpieces of the Disney collection and their flagship theme parks. Indeed, Cinderella's castle itself is at the heart of Disney's Magic Kingdom. The first of Disney's theme parks, the Magic Kingdom was intended to capture the magic and imagination of the Disney movies, and bring to life the settings of Disney stories. Epcot was the second of four (...) parks built at the Walt Disney World Resort location in Florida. While Liberty Square in the Magic Kingdom celebrates the independence of those who live in liberal democracies, the World Showcase at Epcot celebrates multiculturalism, and the possibility of appreciating and learning from a multitude of cultures. The chapter provides a better understanding of the philosophical tensions in Disney's theme park by taking a tour of the underlying political ideas lurking inside the Epcot and Magic Kingdom theme parks. (shrink)

Mischievous, beguiling, seductive, lascivious, unruly, carping, vengeful and manipulative – from the Disney princess to the murderous Medea, the articles in _Re-visiting Female Evil_ grapple with our understanding of what it is to be and do evil femininities.

An individual can be affected by both fate and fortune. In Disney's Brave, Merida is clearly a child of good fortune. She is born a princess, free to run and play without economic worry. She is healthy and talented. She bears the hallmarks of one especially favored by fortune – obviously, with that big red hair! But Merida also has a fate. Merida's bow, given to her by her father, is symbolic of a recurring argument between Merida and the (...) Queen. The final battle with Mor'du raises questions about the relationship of fate, fortune, and character. It seems clear that Merida is fated to confront Mor'du. The Wisps, who act as her guides, appear on occasions when she is helpless, when she is selfish, when she is confused, and finally when she is determined to save her mother, who has been driven from the castle and attacked by her own husband. (shrink)

This article presents a critical analysis of Disney's animated film and stage production of Beauty and the Beast, especially of the heroine, Belle, within a more general and brief historiography of the fairy tale. It is argued that Disney's version displaces the heroic focus from Belle to Beast, while also narrating a response to feminism that involves compressing feminist ideology into conventions of popular romance. The broader representation of femininity in Disney is also examined with reference, particularly, (...) to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and with reflections also on non-fictional characters from media with a relationship to Disney, specifically, Diana Princess of Wales, Lillian Disney and Ellen DeGeneres. Teresa de Lauretis's `elsewhere of vision' is introduced to disrupt and rewrite the domesticating effects of Disney's feminism on its heroines. (shrink)

John Kinsella remains Australia’s most militant, morally cognizant naysayer, and his oeuvre is an archive of precepts running counter to master narratives of place. This essay re-reads Benjamin’s notion of the artist as cultural producer against the grain of Esposito’s etymological excavations of “community,” and frames Kinsella’s steady output of co-authored books as not only a mode of nomadic munificence but no less than a kind of formative guerrilla poetics. Pairing with poets, rock stars, others to extend his anti-capitalist project, (...) Kinsella’s co-authored works perform a suite of interventions, gifting readers a means by which we too might fathom the generative effects of banding together in a munus speaking its own laws to reconfigure notions of co-empowerment, equity, and indeed comradeship. Each of Kinsella’s co-authored books constitutes an intentional community of two and, as if dwelling in compositional possibilities, each text remains steadfastly optimistic. Refusing to be locked into despair by regressively instrumentalist political non-visionaries, from within an Antipodean milieu Kinsella and his many co-authors materialize gestures demonstrating how we might struggle for control of who gets to produce ideas, by which decentralized means, and to which generative ends. (shrink)

In the nearly 800 pages that comprise the three volumes of his Graphology Poems 1995–2015, John Kinsella demonstrates an exemplary moral anger registering iterations of colonial “omni-speak” as unethical. This paper reads Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer by way of apprehending the rhetorical substrata underpinning discourses of Australia as not just determining a sovereign colonial space; in a place where “history is absurdity […] history is overlay”, Kinsella shows how indigenous and non-colonial others are consistently cast as extra-juridical and merely sub-human. (...) These Graphology Poems not only anathemise and hex historical falsehoods of nation: Kinsella dares sound out the bullshit, and his iconoclastic language games refuse outright to acquiesce to the epistemically violent nullifications of antipodean identity. (shrink)

The cholinergic system is a good candidate for the role of determining the relative weight given in cortical information processing to new sensory information versus prior knowledge. We discuss the physiological data supporting this, and suggest that this Bayesian perspective can easily be reconciled with the dynamical framework proposed by Behrendt & Young.

The learning process of both students and teachers can be predicted based on the learning mode. Therefore, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools must start using online learning and abandon more traditional teaching techniques. Thus, this study investigates the relationship between self-efficacy and academic resilience among 150 senior high school students. Thus, the researchers employed General Self-Efficacy and Resilience Scale. Finally, the statistical analysis reveals that the r coefficient of 0.78 indicates a high positive correlation between the variables. The p-value (...) of 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision to reject the null hypothesis. Hence, a significant relationship exists between self-efficacy and resilience among senior high school students. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated profound global transformations, and in the Philippines, Emergency Remote Learning (ERT) emerged as a vital response to address the educational needs of students during this crisis. While existing research has extensively examined the challenges faced by parents during ERT, limited attention was devoted to understanding the unique experiences of parents of children with intellectual disabilities (ID) and hearing impairments (HI). Using a qualitative descriptive case study within interpretative paradigm, this study aims to fill this gap (...) by exploring the challenges encountered and coping strategies employed by 15 parents in the Philippines who have children with ID and HI. Findings illuminate the multifaceted challenges faced by parents, encompassing their roles as caregivers and facilitators of their children’s education. Moreover, it reveals the support mechanisms available to these parents, while also highlighting the pressing need for additional assistance to better meet the complex needs of these children. The research also identifies the most effective strategies employed by parents to navigate the challenges of remote learning. The results serve as a critical resource for parents, educators, and policymakers, providing a roadmap for enhancing the support system for families with children who have ID and HI, particularly during times of crisis. (shrink)

For a number of years, those interested in recovering women's thought have known about Princess Elisabeth, a seventeenth-century correspondent and friend of Descartes whose questions provoked the philosopher to think more seriously about ethics and the passions. Up to now, only a few of her letters have found their way into print. This volume includes translations of all of Elisabeth's extant letters to Descartes, as well as of other materials relevant to understanding her philosophical perspective and her life. Nye has (...) supplemented the translations with a running commentary on the historical, biographical, and intellectual context of the letters. (shrink)

(1999). Princess Elizabeth and Descartes: The union of soul and body and the practice of philosophy. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 503-520. doi: 10.1080/09608789908571042.

This research examines the nature of gender presentation of men who were the stars on Disney Channel shows. Research has already examined how young women who were Disney stars become quickly sexualised and perceived as women under the male gaze. However, there is little corresponding research on boys who are subject to the scrutiny of the public. I engage in a phenomenological content analysis of the social media of three adult male actors who starred on the show Wizards (...) of Waverly Place. The nature of masculine gender capital encourages these men to move towards a masculine ideal while recognising they are under the erotic gaze. These men push to be severed from their youth identities, forming a strategic boundary that nods to the homoeroticism surrounding their identity. (shrink)

Disney’s animated villains have recently changed to show less conventionally villainous traits: They look and express themselves more like sympathetic characters, and they are usually only outed as villains late in the plot. This shift has prompted much academic com­mentary on the psychological and cultural significance of Disney’s new villains. We add to the existing literature on Disney’s new villains in two ways. First, we analyze shifts in the vocalizations of villains between the 1990s and 2010s. Second, (...) we integrate this analysis in a biocultural account of Disney’s shifting overall representations of villains. We argue that while Disney has long employed evolutionarily explicable cues to villainy, such as a foreign accent and an unappealing exterior, the company is now reacting to challenges to norms of social representation that proscribe the linking of such overt traits with immorality. Con­sequently, recent Disney films do not employ socially stigmatizing cues. However, Disney continues to employ nonstigmatizing cues, such as evil laughter and abiding anger, because these cues foster antipathy in audiences at no sociomoral risk. (shrink)

Les princesses participaient pleinement à la mobilité qui caractérisait le mode de vie et l'habitus de la haute noblesse à l'époque moderne. La plupart du temps délaissés par les études sur le voyage ou considérés comme de simples “ affaires de famille ” dépourvues de toute importance sociale ou politique, les voyages de princesses revêtaient, au contraire, un caractère hautement politique. Dans la haute noblesse, les femmes qui visitaient des cours différentes, jouaient un rôle clé pour les relations (...) extérieures d'une maison au même titre que les voyageurs hommes. La fonction politique du voyage allait souvent de pair avec de nombreux transferts culturels, destinés à augmenter le prestige et le rang d'une cour. Les voyages de princesses laissaient ainsi des marques durables sur la vie de cour et, au-delà, sur la société de leur pays d'origine. (shrink)

This chapter is a re-consideration of the powerful set of objections to the Cartesian theory of mind that Princess Elisabeth offered in her 1643–49 correspondence with Descartes. Much of the scholarly discussion of this correspondence has focused on Elisabeth’s initial criticisms of Descartes’ views of mind–body interaction and union, and has presented these criticisms as assuming the general principle that objects with heterogeneous natures cannot interact. However, this account of the criticisms fails to capture not only their basic import, but (...) also their connections to Elisabeth’s remarks later in the correspondence regarding both the ability of rational deliberation to lead us to happiness, and the freedom of our will from determining conditions. The attempt here is to offer a new account of Elisabeth’s objections to Cartesian interaction that serves to relate them to her critical evaluation of Descartes’ views of happiness and freedom. Such an account leads us to see Elisabeth as challenging Descartes throughout to take seriously the extent to which our mind is not merely a rational thinking thing, but also something that is profoundly conditioned by the passions that it receives from the body. (shrink)

Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan _Deconstructing Disney_ London: Pluto Press, 1999 ISBN 0 7453 1456 2 (hbk) 209 pp.

A presence for decades in individuals’ everyday life practices and identity formation, the Walt Disney Company has more recently also become an influential element within the "big" curriculum of public and private spaces outside of yet in proximity to formal educational institutions. _Disney, Culture, and Curriculum_ explores the myriad ways that Disney’s curricula and pedagogies manifest in public consciousness, cultural discourses, and the education system. Examining Disney’s historical development and contemporary manifestations, this book critiques and deconstructs its (...) products and perspectives while providing insight into Disney’s operations within popular culture and everyday life in the United States and beyond. The contributors engage with Disney’s curricula and pedagogies in a variety of ways, through critical analysis of Disney films, theme parks, and planned communities, how Disney has been taught and resisted both in and beyond schools, ways in which fans and consumers develop and negotiate their identities with their engagement with Disney, and how race, class, gender, sexuality, and consumerism are constructed through Disney content. Incisive, comprehensive, and highly interdisciplinary, _Disney, Culture, and Curriculum_ extends the discussion of popular culture as curriculum and pedagogy into new avenues by focusing on the affective and ontological aspects of identity development as well as the commodification of social and cultural identities, experiences, and subjectivities. (shrink)

Since the 1980s Disney has opened a new overseas theme park every decade. After finding success in Tokyo in 1983, subsequent parks in Paris and Hong Kong have struggled to profit financially and connect culturally with locals. For Shanghai in 2016, Disney utilized a new discourse for the parkʼs development and configuration termed “authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese.” In this paper, Disneyʼs emotional branding strategy for Shanghai Disneyland is analyzed using a framework of five antecedents for creating affective (...) attachment to brands. In addition, the pragmatics of the dyadic phrase and the intertextuality of the parkʼs composition demonstrate that unlike previous international Disneylands, Disney blurred and removed cultural and contextual references to America from Shanghai in an effort to achieve resonance with Chinese visitors. The result is Chinaʼs Disneyland, not Disneyland in China. Though Shanghaiʼs revenue and attendance figures are good so far, Disney will likely face challenges to its new emotional branding strategy from within China and the US. (shrink)

The Disney movie Frozen is the fifth highest grossing movie of all time. In order to better understand this phenomenon and to hypothesize as to why the movie resonated so strongly with audiences, we have interpreted the movie using psychodynamic theory. We pay particular attention to the themes of puberty, adolescence and sibling relationships and discuss examples of ego defenses that are employed by the lead character in relation to these concepts.

: This paper focuses on Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's philosophical views as exhibited in her early correspondence with René Descartes. Elisabeth's criticisms of Descartes's interactionism as well as her solution to the problem of mind-body interaction are examined in detail. The aim here is to develop a richer picture of Elisabeth as a philosophical thinker and to dispel the myth that she is simply a Cartesian muse.

Recent bioarchaeological and phylogenetic studies have identified Central Asia as an early reservoir for Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the bubonic plague in humans and animals. Lacking documentary evidence, however, historians have heretofore been unable to find a place for South, East, and Central Asia in the premodern history of the plague. This article uses Tibetan-, Chinese-, and Khotanese-language sources to tell a history of the bubonic plague in Central Asia between the seventh and ninth centuries. From official Tibetan (...) histories, we learn of human and animal plagues at the turn of the eighth century. From the prophetic narratives of Khotan, we learn of an unnamed Chinese princess who died in Tibet with a black pox on her chest. Finally, interpreting Tibetan and Khotanese translations of an Āyurvedic medical text in light of bioarchaeological data, we can begin to retrospectively diagnose the plagues of Central Asia. More than just the documentary history of a specific plague outbreak, these sources demonstrate the variegated responses to centuries of plague in Central Asia, including narrative description, scapegoating, ritual protection, humoral diagnosis, and pharmacological and surgical therapies. The end result is an integrated account of the bubonic plague in Central Asia based on Tibetan and Khotanese explanations of epidemics. (shrink)

In My Princesses Learn to Share, Princess Grace and Princess Hope want to wear the same pink dress when they play dress-up. They end up ripping the dress, but Mom has a story to help them learn to share. She tells them the story of Jesus and the young boy who shared his lunch. The girls get the picture, Mom mends the dress, and they learn to share.

Princess Elisabeth and Anne Conway were contemporaries whose lives present many striking parallels. From their early interest in Descartes’ philosophy to their encounter with Van Helmont and the Quakers in their maturity, both were brought into contact with the same sets of ideas and forms of spirituality at similar points in their lives. Despite their common interest in philosophy, and their many mutual acquaintances, it is difficult to ascertain what either knew about the other, and whether either knew anything about (...) the other’s philosophy. This paper reviews the evidence for connections between them and their knowledge of one another. After outlining the parallels in their personal circumstances and the sources for their knowledge of each other, I discuss key intermediaries: Henry More, the Hartlib Circle, Francis Mercury van Helmont and the Quaker leaders Robert Barclay and George Keith. Although they were certainly aware of one another, the answer to the question of whether there was any philosophical inter-change between them remains especially elusive. (shrink)

This study provides a comprehensive intellectual biography of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. The author highlights Elisabeth’s place in the Western intellectual tradition and contextualizes her contributions within the social and cultural landscape of seventeenth-century Europe.

This paper explores Elisabeth’s remark that ruling and studying each demands an entire person, with the aim of understanding why she might think ruling and intellectual pursuits like philosophy are incompatible with one another. While Elisabeth identifies several barriers to philosophizing, she does not suggest that time constraints are an impediment to both philosophizing and ruling. Situating Elisabeth with respect to Plato, Machiavelli, and Aristotle suggests that she holds there are many similarities between governing and philosophizing. The methodology and skill (...) set of a ruler and a philosopher are very similar; both need to organize their thoughts, consider an array of possible alternatives, gather background information, and be decisive; both take virtue, truth, and justice as their ends, and they are driven by a central concern for something other than themselves. Though both can be moved to high emotions by external forces, they can cultivate the self-awareness that can serve in modulating those emotions in a variety of ways. However, a difference lies in the ways in which the objects of their decisions are constrained in time. This difference in turn disposes each to different emotions. Insofar as their lives are tightly integrated, a ruler and a philosopher would have different affective profiles and organize their lives around different principles. In virtue of these differences, a ruler and a philosopher would indeed need to be two entire persons. (shrink)

Between the years 1643 and 1649, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes exchanged fifty-eight letters—thirty-two from Descartes and twenty-six from Elisabeth. Their correspondence contains the only known extant philosophical writings by Elisabeth, revealing her mastery of metaphysics, analytic geometry, and moral philosophy, as well as her keen interest in natural philosophy. The letters are essential reading for anyone interested in Descartes’s philosophy, in particular his account of the human being as a union of mind and body, as well as (...) his ethics. They also provide a unique insight into the character of their authors and the way ideas develop through intellectual collaboration. Philosophers have long been familiar with Descartes’s side of the correspondence. Now Elisabeth’s letters—never before available in translation in their entirety—emerge this volume, adding much-needed context and depth both to Descartes’s ideas and the legacy of the princess. Lisa Shapiro’s annotated edition—which also includes Elisabeth’s correspondence with the Quakers William Penn and Robert Barclay—will be heralded by students of philosophy, feminist theorists, and historians of the early modern period. (shrink)

O que esta resenha busca é a apresentação e análise do artigo Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia as a Cartesian – publicado como o décimo sétimo capítulo do livro The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism –, da comentadora Lisa Shapiro, também tradutora das correspondências entre Descartes e Elisabeth para a língua inglesa e grande pesquisadora do tema.

Until now, no one has unlocked the profound secrets of this wise and witty adventure tale. If you've wondered why men of action shouldn't lie, how the Battle of Wits could have turned out differently, what a rotten miracle would look like and whether it would amount to malpractice, or how Westley could have killed a lot of innocent people and still be a good guy, then The Princess Bride and Philosophy has all the answers"--P. [4] of cover.

Historians are showing increasing interest in scientific internationalism, the notion that science transcends national differences and hence advances peace and cooperation. This notion became particularly popular in the decades around 1900, the heyday of the universal expositions and the so-called first era of globalization. In this article I argue that in order to properly historicize scientific internationalism, it is imperative to understand how actors imagined science to have pacifist effects, and to relate their technoscientific to their geopolitical imaginaries. To illustrate (...) this, I analyze the 1911 novel Der Menschheit Hochgedanken (translated as When Thoughts Will Soar) by the famous Austrian pacifist Baroness Bertha von Suttner. It tells the story of a scientific conference whose participants, by the sheer brilliance of their thought, ward off war and preserve world peace. Relating the novel to von Suttner’s own life experiences, I situate her internationalism in the social texture and international relations of the late Habsburg Empire. It appears that Von Suttner mobilized notions of the pacific effects of science with an eye to preserving both the European system of states and the position of the aristocracy. (shrink)

THE PRIMARY GOAL OF THIS ESSAY IS TO BRING PUBLIC AWARENESS OF MILitary prostitution sprung up around U.S. military bases across the globe. With a focus on the lived experiences of Korean military prostitutes for American soldiers in South Korea, this essay argues that military prostitution should be considered a human reality in the realm of international politics: the U.S. empire building at the expenses of women's bodies. This argument further aims to foster Christian feminist—social ethics that reconstructs a Christian (...) realistic approach to globalized militarism, the relation between sensuality and sexuality, and transnational solidarity for peace. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to Rene DescartesRichard A. WatsonAndrea Nye. The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to Rene Descartes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xiii + 187. Cloth, $57.95. Paper, $18.95.Princess Elisabeth was an acute, persistent critic of Descartes's philosophy. Because he liked her and she was a princess, Descartes did not dismiss her (...) criticisms as he did those of Gassendi and Hobbes. How can an immaterial mind interact with a material body? How can God determine all our actions and yet give us free will? Elisabeth was dissatisfied with Descartes's answer that an all-powerful God can do anything even if we cannot understand how.Andrea Nye analyzes the correspondence between Elisabeth and Descartes to support the thesis that Elisabeth developed and defended a worldly philosophy of life in opposition to the unworldly rules Descartes offered for living a tranquil and happy life. Descartes said she should focus on the separation of the mind from the body to avoid disturbing the intellect with sensory matters. Think positively about such nice things as birds and flowers and not of bad things that happen to one. Descartes told Elisabeth that "there are no events so dreadful, nor so absolutely bad in the judgments of people, that a person of spirit cannot look on them with a bias that makes them appear favorable" (48). If we do our best to find out the right course of action and act accordingly, then even if the results are bad, we have no reason for remorse or recrimination, but can be happy that we have done the best we can. Descartes even says that a person who follows his rules can view everything that happens to him, even the worst, as though these events were taking place in a theatre, for in the end they do not impinge upon the ultimate happiness of one's immortal soul.Elisabeth, earnestly. sardonically, and sometimes with annoyance responds that this is perhaps possible for a single man of independent means with few civil and personal relationships, but for someone engaged in family affairs, royal politics, and social interaction with other human beings, Descartes's philosophy of life is both impossible and wrong. One never knows what is best; even if one did know, it is difficult to carry it out; and finally, if the results are bad, then one is after all responsible. One would be inhuman to deny fault, monstrous to deny moral responsibility. Above all, Elisabeth says, one should not view one's own life as theatre. One must be responsible for oneself and others.Nye casts this as a difference between Descartes's abstract and Elisabeth's particularist approaches to life, but also as a contrast between those who can live a disengaged life and those who cannot. Some of the amusement in Nye's perceptive discussions comes from her showing how Descartes's passions often run away with him, and how Elisabeth gently turns his own rules back onto him. [End Page 277]Nye's analyses of the correspondence are excellent, but she makes some mistakes about the lives of Descartes and Elisabeth. Nye explains Descartes's coolness by his having suffered from a "motherless infancy" (129), even speaking of "the mother's milk denied him as a child" and calling him an "orphan" (156), which he was not. His mother died thirteen months after his birth, but he had a wet nurse. Descartes may never have tasted his own mother's milk, but he was never deprived of nursing. Children were often sent to live with wet nurses for as long as four years, although Descartes is traditionally said to have been raised by his grandmother. In any event, such psychoanalyzing is off the mark.Nye also says that Descartes was asked by Queen Christina to write a ballet. She cites the wrong ballet and attributes a verse from the right ballet incorrectly, but beyond that, there is no evidence either that Descartes wrote verses for a ballet or that Christina asked him to.Then Nye speaks of Descartes's daughter Francine... (shrink)

We examine the British newspapers' coverage of the death of Princess Diana and its immediate aftermath. Our main focus is on how the press dealt with the issue of their own potential culpability, as a feature of news reporting itself. The press deployed a series of descriptive categories and rhetorical oppositions, including regular press vs paparazzi; tabloid vs broadsheet; British vs foreign; supply vs demand ; and a number of general purpose devices such as a contrast between emotional reactions and (...) considered judgments. The study has two major aims: to analyse the textual workings of the press, as a medium of factual reportage operating within a range of normative requirements for factual objectivity, public concern, responsible journalism, meeting readers' demands, etc.; and to contribute to a generally applicable discourse analytic approach to how factual reports are assembled, used, and undermined, in an interplay of description and accountability. (shrink)

The hotel is at the other end of the government district, near Capitol Hill and the Library of Congress, where I would present a lecture on a classical Brazilian author the next day. When I tell the taxi driver that we have to be at the State Department in twenty minutes, his black forehead wrinkles. That might be difficult, he says, because of a Latino demonstration against the new immigration laws. Nervously I ask if there is some shortcut and add (...) in a half whisper that I have an appointment with the Secretary. “Good girl,” says the driver jovially but…. (shrink)