Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

When abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and Ottobah Cugoano published their essays on slavery in the late eighteenth century, they became key participants in one of the most important human rights campaigns in history. British abolitionism sought to expose the realities of transatlantic slavery in addition to asking politicians to help dehumanized Africans in the New World, and this edition brings together two major essays of the 1780s that were influential in the spread of the early abolitionist movement: Clarkson’s _An Essay on (...) the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species_ and Cugoano’s _Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species_. A critical introduction and extensive historical appendices on British and American slavery and abolitionism, featuring contemporary arguments for and against slavery, are also included. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Conscience and Calling: Ethical Reflections on Catholic Women's Church Vocations by Anne E. PatrickMary M. Doyle RocheConscience and Calling: Ethical Reflections on Catholic Women's Church Vocations Anne E. Patrick NEW YORK AND LONDON: BLOOMSBURY T&T CLARK, 2013. 197 PP. $24.95In Conscience and Calling, Anne Patrick weaves together insights into women's moral agency, vocational discernment, and historical narratives of religious women's engagement with clerical authority. Taking up James (...) Gustafson's question, "What is God enabling and requiring us to be and to do?" she offers a nuanced view of virtuous discernment and action in the context of the "ecclesial oppression" of women. Patrick asks, "What is correct 'church practice' for female moral agents in view of the institutionalized injustice toward women in Catholicism?" (59).Chapter 1 begins with cases of conflict between women's religious congregations and clerical leadership. In the first case, Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary protested intolerable living conditions at a parish in Brooklyn, New [End Page 201] York, in 1939. When repeated requests for heat fell on the pastor's deaf ears, the sisters requested to leave the parish and were told that they would then also have to leave another thriving ministry in the diocese. The sisters acquiesced to this decision in a spirit of obedience and did not publicize the real reason for their departure. Fifty years later in Miami, Florida, when another conflict arose, the sisters involved discerned a very different response to injustice, one marked by concern for "justice, honesty, and personal responsibility." The model of a "good sister" had shifted from an emphasis on obedience and institutional loyalty toward shared responsibility for ministry and leadership.Chapter 2 surveys the landscape of women's engagement with the Church and its structures of leadership and adapts H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture to sketch five "types": women against the Church; women content with the Church; women above the Church; women and Church in paradox; and women transforming Church. Patrick proposes the transformationist model as the approach that most adequately meets the challenges that women face in the Church today; she calls on those who adopt this approach to live in creative tension with the Church and with those who follow the other models, to espouse justice and mutuality in organizational structures, and to be self-critical. Chapter 3 recounts the history of the National Assembly of Religious Women through this transformational lens.Chapter 4 proposes a "framework for love" that builds on Margaret Farley's ethic of commitment to envision an ethic of vocation that elicits "active receptivity," values the contributions of institutions, practices egalitarianism, and keeps justice and love in dialectical relationship. The "myth" of vocation (the notion that vocation is a "thing" to be discovered and pursued, like one's destiny or soul mate) is balanced by the "mystery" of vocation that engages ongoing, lifelong discernment. Controversial cases involving women religious illustrate this kind of discernment and women's striving to live justly and faithfully. The final chapter, "Vocation in a Transformed Social Context," recounts the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's visitation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, a case that has changed the landscape for women's discernment once again. Patrick calls the Church to live out its rhetorical commitment to the dignity of women by opening all church ministries so that women might serve and lead.Conscience and Calling tells an important story about how women religious have discerned the signs of the times and imagined new vocations in the Church and the world. Though the focus here is on women in the American Catholic Church, Patrick's contribution should pave the way for sharing religious women's stories in the global context to further enrich a Christian vision of virtue and vocation for those navigating ecclesial politics and practicing ministry in particular. [End Page 202]Mary M. Doyle RocheCollege of the Holy CrossCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Research into intuitive problem solving has shown that objective closeness of participants’ hypotheses were closer to the accurate solution than their subjective ratings of closeness. After separating conceptually intuitive problem solving from the solutions of rational incremental tasks and of sudden insight tasks, we replicated this finding by using more precise measures in a conceptual problem-solving task. In a second study, we distinguished performance level, processing style, implicit knowledge and subjective feeling of closeness to the solution within the problem-solving task (...) and examined the relationships of these different components with measures of intelligence and personality. Verbal intelligence correlated with performance level in problem solving, but not with processing style and implicit knowledge. Faith in intuition, openness to experience, and conscientiousness correlated with processing style, but not with implicit knowledge. These findings suggest that one needs to decompose processing style and intuitive components in problem solving to make predictions on effects of intelligence and personality measures. (shrink)

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

Well-organized and highly readable Sex and Gender: The Human Experience provides a current, multicultural analysis of gender-related issues, theories, and research. The authors' clear presentation of the perspectives and issues related to sex and gender studies enables students to easily comprehend the material. Further, a highly practical approach prompts students to examine their self-awareness and social tolerance. Sex and Gender: The Human Experience is appropriate as a primary or supplementary text in Psychology, Family Studies, or Women's Studies curricula.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Best Love of the Child: Being Loved and Being Taught to Love as the First Human Right ed. by Timothy P. JacksonMary M. Doyle RocheReview of The Best Love of the Child: Being Loved and Being Taught to Love as the First Human Right EDITED TIMOTHY P. JACKSON Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. 416 pp. $28.00With The Best Love of the Child, Eerdmans adds to an (...) already impressive roster of books on children and families. While previous contributions to the field have challenged the appropriateness of rights in addressing the needs of children, Best Love explores the “best interest” standard that is commonly used by courts and international bodies to adjudicate cases involving children. The book’s fundamental claim is that what is “best” for children involves being loved and being taught to love. Although the essays in this volume acknowledge that the primary locus for the love and care of children is the family, they also engage other contexts including religious communities, courts, and legislative bodies.In a section dealing with social-psychological perspectives on this theme, Peter Benson and Eugene Roehlkepartain make the case that doing the best for children requires shifting from a deficit model that focuses on what children lack to a model that emphasizes their developmental assets. Other chapters in this section highlight the ways parents can pursue the best for children by introducing them to spiritual practices rooted in love for God and compassion [End Page 231] toward others, and by providing them with a narrative-rich environment that deepens bonds between adults and children.A section on historical perspectives continues this trajectory by highlighting the vocations of children from the late thirteenth century on to the early modern period. In his concluding essay in this section, Charles Reid links historical and contemporary concerns by focusing on the right to life and its implications for analyses of war and healthcare access.In a section on philosophical and theological perspectives, Cynthia Willett challenges liberal understandings of rights in view of the experiences of children and argues for an approach that recognizes a central paradox of human freedom: that relationships of interdependence do not weaken freedom but rather enhance it. This paves the way for developing a sense of collective responsibility for children based on shared commitments to justice and solidarity that reach beyond the privatized family. Richard Osmer tackles the concept of original sin in order to advance a vision of a missional church in which congregations work with families to encourage authoritative—rather than authoritarian—styles of parenting that model mutual forgiveness. Marcia Bunge’s contribution is the most practical, offering a list of practices for children, families, and congregations for nurturing children’s vocations.In a concluding section on legal perspectives, Michael Broyde notes that, in the context of custody cases in Jewish law, the primary question is not who loves the child the most but rather who can best meet the child’s needs in an atmosphere of respect. Margaret Brinig and Steven Nock argue that law can, in fact, foster the love of children and the potential children have for becoming loving themselves by promoting family structures that are stable and afforded status in the community. In this way families can model the covenantal relationships of unconditional love in which children thrive. The collection concludes with an essay by Don Browning that emphasizes weaving together love’s affective elements with the very practical activities of caring for children and respecting their emerging selves.By inviting thoughtful reflection on how loving and being loved are central to the well-being of children in families and other institutions, Best Love makes an important contribution to the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. The book is best suited for graduate students, although the essays by Osmer and Bunge are relevant to pastoral settings. [End Page 232]Mary M. Doyle RocheCollege of the Holy CrossCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

If I choose two words in the book that I think have been most influential, I would choose "mutually exclusive." Sacks was scarcely the first critic to observe that the kinds of fiction are usually actions, apologues, or satires. But no other theoretician has insisted so cogently as he did that, as principles governing the interaction of parts in a coherent work, these principles are mutually exclusive, "mutually incompatible." The reason Sacks became a great journal editor was that the firmness (...) of his own principles never blinded him to the value of other and very different theoretical questions which might be addressed to a work of fiction. And his tone of voice was never brazen but always that of the eighteenth-century gentleman: Come, let us reason together. Yet he never blinked his adherence to the truths he saw: he stated them directly, and he taught us to strive equally to face the consequences of holistic recognition of forms: "One cannot create an action which is also a satire any more than he can write an active sentence which is also a passive sentence in English. To carry the analogy a step farther, the observation that the types are mutually incompatible is no more an attempt to dictate to writers what they may or may not do than is the observation that active sentences are not passive sentences" . Mary Doyle Springer, associate professor of English at Saint Mary's College of California, is the author of Forms of the Modern Novella and A Rhetoric of Literary Character: Some Women of Henry James. She is presently at work on a companion theoretical study dealing with the rhetoric of dramatic character in performance. (shrink)

Recent buzzes around big data, data science and artificial intelligence portray a data-driven future for healthcare. As a response, Europe's key players have stimulated the use of big data technologies to make healthcare more efficient and effective. Critical Data Studies and Science and Technology Studies have developed many concepts to reflect on such overly positive narratives and conduct critical policy evaluations. In this study, we argue that there is also much to be learned from studying how professionals in the healthcare (...) field affectively engage with this strong European narrative in concrete big data projects. We followed twelve hospital-based big data pilots in eight European countries and interviewed 145 professionals between 2018 and 2020. In this study, we introduce the metaphor of dreams to describe how professionals link the big data promises to their own frustrations, ideas, values and experiences with healthcare. Our research answers the question: how do professionals in concrete data-driven initiatives affectively engage with European Union's data hopes in their ‘dreams’ – and with what consequences? We describe the dreams of being seen, of timeliness, of connectedness and of being in control. Each of these dreams emphasizes certain aspects of the grand narrative of big data in Europe, makes particular assumptions and has different consequences. We argue that including attention to these dreams in our work could help shine an additional critical light on the big data developments and stimulate the development of responsible data-driven healthcare. (shrink)

The requirements of the UK Equality Act 2010 and some high profile criticism for using a potentially ageist methodology have prompted the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to assess the processes and methodology it uses to make appraisal decisions. This paper argues that NICE has established rigorous systems to protect against ageist decisions, has no track record of ageism and is well placed to meet the requirements of new UK equality legislation.

Il faut saluer la réédition aux Éditions Turquoise de la traduction de Die Waffen nieder!, l’ouvrage antimilitariste de la pacifiste autrichienne Bertha von Suttner, qui, dès sa parution en 1889, devint le best-seller incontesté de la fin du siècle, immédiatement traduit en une vingtaine de langues et en français en 1899. C’est du reste cette traduction, la seule existant à ce jour en langue française, qui est rééditée ici avec la préface d’époque signée par Gaston Moch, dreyfusard de la prem...

Much of the developing world, including Kenya, is rapidly urbanizing. Rising food and fuel prices in recent years have put the food security of the urban poor in a precarious position. In cities worldwide, urban agriculture helps some poor people gain access to food, but urban agriculture is less common in densely populated slums that lack space. In the Kibera slums of Nairobi, Kenya, households have recently begun a new form of urban agriculture called sack gardening in which vegetables such (...) as kale and Swiss chard are planted into large sacks filled with topsoil. This paper examines relationships among sack gardening, social capital, and food security in Kibera. We used a mixed methods approach, combining qualitative interviews with a household survey, as well as focus group discussions with both farmers and non-farmers. We present evidence that sack gardening increases social capital, especially for those households that undertake sack gardening in groups. We also find that sack gardening in the Kibera slums has a positive impact on household food security by improving household dietary diversity and by reducing the need to resort to painful coping mechanisms that are used during food shortages. (shrink)

Tiré d’un mémoire de maîtrise soutenue à l’Université de Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne, sous la direction de Jean-Clément Martin, ici préfacier, Marie-Antoinette et ses biographes. Histoire d’une écriture de la Révolution française, possède les qualités et les défauts de ce type d’exercice. Le titre en est ainsi trompeur, puisqu’il laisse envisager une enquête reposant sur l’ensemble des travaux portant sur la figure historique de Marie-Antoinette. En fait, cinq biographes ont été convoqués et fo...

Objectives During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare resources including staff were diverted from paediatric services to support COVID-positive adult patients. Hospital visiting restrictions and reductions in face-to-face paediatric care were also enforced. We investigated the impact of service changes during the first wave of the pandemic on children and young people (CYP), to inform recommendations for maintaining their care during future pandemics. Design A multi-centre service evaluation was performed through a survey of consultant paediatricians working within the North Thames Paediatric Network, (...) a group of paediatric services in London. We investigated six areas: redeployment, visiting restrictions, patient safety, vulnerable children, virtual care and ethical issues. Results Survey responses were received from 47 paediatricians across six National Health Service Trusts. Children's right to health was largely believed to be compromised by the prioritisation of adults during the pandemic (81%; n = 33). Sub-optimal paediatric care due to redeployment (61%; n = 28) and the impact of visiting restrictions on CYP's mental health (79%; n = 37) were reported. Decreased hospital attendances of CYP were associated with parental fear of COVID-19 infection-risks (96%; n = 45) and government ‘stay at home’ advice (89%; n = 42). Reductions in face-to-face care were noted to have disadvantaged those with complex needs, disabilities and safeguarding concerns. Conclusion Consultant paediatricians perceived that paediatric care was compromised during the first wave of the pandemic, resulting in harm to children. This harm must be minimised in subsequent pandemics. Recommendations for future practice which were developed from our findings are provided, including maintaining face-to-face care for vulnerable children. (shrink)

This paper examines Stanley Cavell's theories from the perspective of a 'politics of cinema' and engages in a critical reading of Sofia Coppola's 2006 film, Marie Antoinette.

ABSTRACT This article examines the resonance of Robert Owen’s ideas in the field of women’s rights with the view to determining the extent of their dissemination in transnational networks. The article focuses on the life and work of Anna Doyle Wheeler, which offers an important, though understudied, case for exploring early feminist circles, and, as she was a friend of Owen’s and one of his earliest supporters from the 1820s onwards, the impact of Owen’s ideas within these circles. The (...) article traces Wheeler’s discovery of Owen’s system and examines how Wheeler fused Owen’s co-operative ideals with calls for women’s emancipation. It analyses her famous Appeal of One Half of the Human Race (1825), a work that urged women to engage ardently in the battle for their political and civil rights, and to join in the establishment of co-operative communities. The article concludes by examining how Wheeler attempted to articulate and put into practice these political and co-operative principles through her involvement in the English, French and Irish co-operative movements, and through her association with Désirée Véret and the contributors to the Tribune des femmes. (shrink)

On comprend aisément pourquoi Slava Liszek, qui fut l’une des rédactrices d’Antoinette - le journal féminin de la CGT - a été touchée par Marie Guillot, au point de lui consacrer plusieurs années de recherche et, finalement, une biographie. À l’évidence, il s’agit d’un hommage rendu à une militante lucide et « incorruptible ». Le style trahit une profonde sympathie pour « Marie », qui pourra, selon les goûts, charmer, ou agacer. De toutes façons, le redoutable défi d’une biographie (...) de Marie G... (shrink)

On comprend aisément pourquoi Slava Liszek, qui fut l’une des rédactrices d’Antoinette - le journal féminin de la CGT - a été touchée par Marie Guillot, au point de lui consacrer plusieurs années de recherche et, finalement, une biographie. À l’évidence, il s’agit d’un hommage rendu à une militante lucide et « incorruptible ». Le style trahit une profonde sympathie pour « Marie », qui pourra, selon les goûts, charmer, ou agacer. De toutes façons, le redoutable défi d’une biographie (...) de Marie G... (shrink)

This paper reads The Monk by M. G. Lewis in the context of the literary and visual responses to the French Revolution, suggesting that its digestion of the horrors across the Channel is exhibited especially in its depictions of women. Lewis plays with public and domestic representations of femininity, steeped in social expectation and a rich cultural and religious imaginary. The novel’s ambivalence in the representation of femininity draws on the one hand on Catholic symbolism, especially its depictions of the (...) Madonna and the virgin saints, and on the other, on the way the revolutionaries used the body of the queen, Marie Antoinette, to portray the corruption of the royal family. The Monk fictionalizes the ways in which the female body was exposed, both by the Church and by the Revolution, and appropriated to become a highly politicized entity, a tool in ideological argumentation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 126.3 (2005) 461-463 [Access article in PDF] Graham Zanker. Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry and Art. Wisconsin Studies in Classics. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. xiv + 223 pp. 34 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $39.95. The underlying contention here is that if a Hellenistic poetic description of a person, an animal, the weather, a scene, or an objet d'art adopts a particular way (...) of viewing, we have independent evidence for the habits of viewing that Hellenistic people would have brought to their contemplation of representational art. (4) So Graham Zanker summarizes the thesis of his new book, the most extensive and detailed account of Hellenistic visuality yet published. This is a carefully worded sentence. Zanker's enumeration of poetic descriptions of "a person, an animal, the weather, a scene or an objet d'art" deliberately exemplifies what he takes to be the scope of ekphrasis and hence reproves those who have taken ekphrasis more narrowly as the description of works of art (cf. 6–10). The target of this disapproval turns out to be especially Simon Goldhill, whom he attacks at 82–83 and in a long endnote (184–85, n. 26). Yet the care to be precise in matters of literary definition goes with such large, even lax, social and cultural generalizations as "Hellenistic people" and "representational art." What Zanker must mean by those whose contemplation of art can be evoked through poetic descriptions is a highly literate and educated social elite—perhaps the court itself—that may have played (Marie-Antoinette-like) at shepherds and fishermen (as in the cup of Theocritus' first Idyll) but surely did so from a much narrower social perspective than the totalizing generalism of "Hellenistic people." The weapon of precision is a dangerous one to use, when it may be turned back on the user.There are, moreover, numerous problems with both the notion of "independent evidence" and that of "habits of viewing." While the literary evidence of ekphrasis (not only in poetry) certainly encompasses viewing, its specially wrought and often spectacular cleverness may signal the exceptional, even the perverse, as much as (or more than) the habitual. Does a revolutionary statue like the Aphrodite of Cnidos (not actually Hellenistic, but nonetheless rightly incorporated at some length in Zanker's book) reflect or elicit the habitual gaze? In what sense? And, if so, when? Was the gaze it enticed at its moment of creation "habitual," or did that gaze only become "habitual" in its numerous—within our surviving material archive of examples, mainly Roman-period—versions and replications? More difficult still is "independent evidence." I am not really sure what that could be in a topic created from critical and interpretative explications of complex images and texts that do not themselves draw explicit or simple conclusions about viewing (or anything) beyond what readers may impute to them. How they may collectively constitute evidence about viewing can only come about as the result of argument. I think a compelling argument based on the critical interpretation of images and texts may be taken as evidence, but is that "independent evidence?" What does this mean? And such a complex argument is a very different kind of evidence from what Zanker seems to mean by any particular viewpoint we may find expressed in an ekphrasis. [End Page 461]Again, I do not think it follows that the evidence for viewing we may entice from a poetic description of a person, an animal, or the weather need necessarily be related to the contemplation of a work of art. Indeed, Zanker's use of the term contemplation (with its Kantian overtones) appears to indicate a specifically aesthetic zone of response. Certainly the Hellenistic period explicitly elevated creativity in the visual arts to a new canonical status with its creation of art-historical narratives and histories devolving on the rise of naturalism and on the genius of particular hallowed artists who are preserved for us by the likes of Quintilian and Pliny. That special aestheticism, marked in the choice of works of... (shrink)

Thomas Carlyle, renowned nineteenth-century essayist and social critic, came to be thought of as a secular prophet by many of his readers and as the "undoubted head of English letters" by Ralph Waldo Emerson. _Historical Essays _brings together Carlyle's essays on history and historical subjects in a fully annotated modern edition for the first time. These essays, which were originally collected in _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, _span Carlyle's career from 1830 to 1875 and represent a major facet of his writings. (...) This edition uses all the extant authoritative versions of the essays to create an accurate critical text and includes a mine of lucidly presented information to enhance readers' understanding of Carlyle's densely allusive prose. The collection includes essays on the French Revolution, Cromwell, Frederick the Great, and medieval Scandinavia. It also includes such essential pieces as "On History," "On History Again," "Count Cagliostro," and "The Diamond Necklace." Together the essays show Carlyle positioning himself in relation to the new Romantic historiography but not yet ready to adopt the strictures of modern scientific history. They also exhibit his talent for analyzing the historical significance of seemingly minor events. He describes a plot to steal a diamond necklace in which Marie Antoinette became implicated, a visit of Whig sympathizers to the National Assembly during the French Revolution, and the kidnapping of two fifteenth-century German princes, one of whose descendents was Carlyle’s contemporary Prince Albert. This volume, the third of the eight-volume Strouse Edition of Carlyle’s works, includes a historical introduction and illustrations along with complete textual apparatus. (shrink)

ALTHOUGH "CHILD LABOR" IS UNIVERSALLY CONDEMNED, CHILD WORK will be a feature of global life for the foreseeable future because many children without adequate access to the requisites of human dignity must work to gain them. With help from the recent work of John Wall, Mary M. Doyle Roche, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, and others, the author claims children's right to work in Ethna Regan's sense, as an expression of a "situated universal." Rights on this view are real but (...) contingent. They are means to protect universal human goods and vulnerabilities under attack in particular situations. In this case, a situated right to work protects children's flourishing in a global culture still shaped by liberal and capitalist institutions, even as it criticizes that culture's injustices and exclusions. (shrink)

In the foreword to the Mercure de France edition of de Staël., Chantal Thomas, French historian and writer, writes that this apology in favor of Marie-Antoinette did not help the queen nor the author herself; on the contrary it only made the latter more unpopular. So why did Germaine de Staël write it? Mme de Staël and Marie-Antoinette did not share many interests; however, at the moment of The Women’s March on Versailles in October 1789, the situation had (...) changed. It was at this moment, when Mme de Staël witnessed people’s hatred for the Queen, that she for the first time felt that she was on her side. She had the feeling that the Queen would be a victim to a public opinion that had been “manipulated” in a systematic way, and to which she herself had been a victim. Pursuing some ideas formulated by Reddy and in their work on emotion and empathy in history and philosophy respectively, I hope to offer some suggestions, with the aid of cultural semiotics. More specifically I hope to be able to provide some answers to the question whether Mme de Staël’s apology might be regarded as an act of compassion. (shrink)

Ce dictionnaire propose de réunir des portraits de brutes et de mégères dans le but de s'interroger sur les causes et les raisons de cette perception négative. Pourquoi certaines figures évoquent-elles la méchanceté? Que peut nous dire cette méchanceté dénoncée de nous-mêmes et de l'époque qui l'a engendrée? Il s'agira de retracer les portraits de ceux et celles ayant marqué l'Histoire et la fiction par leur cruauté, leur perfidie, leur machiavélisme, leur art de la dissimulation ou de la manipulation. S'attarder (...) sur la méchanceté et ses possibles, décliner les façons de la penser et de la vivre, de la subir ou de l'exercer, c'est s'intéresser à une facette peu valorisée de la sensibilité d'autant plus importante que chaque individu, de près ou de loin, est amené, un jour, à se montrer méchant. La méchanceté et ses manifestations, qu'elles soient conceptuelles ou biographiques, nous invitent donc à une introspection globale, à une immersion dans les affres de la noirceur des âmes dont la bouche n'est autre que celle de la méchanceté Le champ de cette entreprise est vaste et recouvre notamment : La Malice, le Machiavélisme, Orangina Rouge, Barbe Bleue, le cinéma d'Alfred Hitchcock, Marie-Antoinette, la Mauvaise conscience, Gilles de Rais, Harry Powell (La nuit du chasseur) Salomé-Hérodiade, Dracula, Tatie Danielle, Marie Tudor, la Perversité, la Mégère Grecque, Dark Vador, Mildred Ratched (Vol au-dessus d'un nid de coucou)... (shrink)

This essay sketches the musical art of Frances Pelton-Jones, an American harpsichordist active at the beginning of the twentieth century. Almost entirely unknown today, she was widely acclaimed in her day for performing elaborate costume recitals dressed as Marie Antoinette. More than just a recitalist in costume, Pelton-Jones staged elaborate tableaux vivants with environmental decor to elicit fantasies of the past. Bridging the worlds of fashion, environmental design, and music, her performances offer a compelling case study to investigate the (...) aesthetic applications of Jane Bennett’s ecological theory of assemblages. Exploring how different human and nonhuman actants collaborated in Pelton-Jones’ art to evoke whole historical atmospheres for her audiences, I elaborate Bennett’s argument about the synthetic potential of combining certain materials to conjure an affect, highlighting how the delicacy of the assemblage as a whole often is contingent upon the frailty of the individual materials involved. Ultimately, Bennett’s theory affirms the aesthetic sensibilities of Pelton-Jones whose musical productions delighted audiences by harnessing the synthetic potential of well-coordinated vital materials. (shrink)

En ces temps où, dans la production éditoriale comme au cinéma, Marie-Antoinette est à la mode, il faut absolument s’arrêter sur cet ouvrage. Le titre exact de ce court pamphlet (30 p.), publié anonymement en août 1793 après le renvoi de Marie-Antoinette devant le Tribunal révolutionnaire, est Réflexions sur le procès de la reine par une femme. Et c’est aux femmes que l’auteure s’adresse en premier, aux « femmes de tous les pays, de toutes les classes de la (...) société » : sensibles, elles ne peu... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 91-95 [Access article in PDF] From: A Symposium on Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture Jeffrey Walker For who does not know, except them, that the art of using letters is fixed and unchanging, so that we always use the same letters for the same purposes, but in the art of discourse the case is entirely the reverse? —Isocrates, Against the SophistsThe essays composing this issue (...) of Philosophy and Rhetoric are based on papers that originally were presented at a symposium on "Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture," sponsored by the Emory University Center for Teaching and Curriculum, Department of English, and Hightower Fund, in March 2001. The ostensible purpose of the symposium was to consider the double nature and status of rhetoric: on one hand, a hermeneutic/theoretical discipline with applications across the humanities (in the analysis of texts, events, culture, argumentative practices, ideologies, and so forth); and, on the other hand, a practical "art of discourse," a techne, whose central or distinctive application is the training of skilled writers and speakers. The former tends to be emphasized in contemporary rhetorical studies, while the latter is the most familiar (though not necessarily essential) characteristic of "classical" or ancient rhetoric. Likewise, we can connect these two orientations, respectively, with rhetorical cultural studies and with the teaching of writing, speaking, and communication in general. While the natural assumption is that these two orientations are mutually supporting, that is not always or necessarily the case. One can argue that the first pulls in the direction of "philosophy" (however that may be defined), while the second pulls in the direction of sheer technique—and at one time or another, each has been [End Page 91] open to criticism for its lack of attention to the other: philosophers are ineffective rhetoricians, and cannot intervene in the public sphere; orators are superficial thinkers, and practice an irresponsible, demagogic art of manipulation and domination. This tension goes all the way back to the first critiques of the sophists, and plays out through the entire history of rhetoric. The symposium's speakers, then, were asked to reflect, in any way that seemed suitable to them, on either or both aspects of rhetoric's double nature, and/or the relationships between them.A symposium, inevitably, as a rhetorical event, always takes its own somewhat unpredictable trajectory, as papers are produced and presented, and as the ensuing discussion unfolds. And the four essays presented here—Steven Mailloux on Frederick Douglass and the nineteenth-century American debate over slavery; Susan Wells on "double consciousness" in S. Weir Mitchell's account of the case of Mary Reynolds and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; James L. Kastely on the discontinuity between the "philosophical" and "technical" halves of Plato's Phaedrus;and Richard Doyle on the strange intersection between the emergence of LSD and the evolution of biotechnological understandings of DNA—are all revisions and expansions of the original presentations, reflecting the contingencies of their invention and reinvention. Nevertheless, the original motives of the symposium are still in evidence.As different as these essays are, it can be said that one or two underlying themes run through them, and provide a reply to the original topic proposed for the symposium. Perhaps the keynote is what Mailloux describes as "rhetorical paths of thought": that is, the "migration" and "evolution" of topoi, figures, lines of arguments, bits of narratives, and rhetorical traditions themselves (or fragments of them?) "from one community to another... [and] from one cultural moment to the next," as Frederick Douglass takes in the rhetorical traditions, practices, tropes and arguments exemplified in the Columbian Orator, as well as Aristotle's arguments on slavery, and as they become enabling parts of his own rhetorical repertoire in the debate on abolition. In Wells's essay, this appears as the "refunctioning" or reworking of topoi, as the notion of "double consciousness" is adapted as part of a "new logic of scientific authority" in Mitchell's account of "split personality," and also as a way of understanding and performing public discourse and identity in... (shrink)