Bleak House and Kierkegaard in a Leveling Age

Biblical Allusion in the Opening Numbers of Three of Charles Dickens’s Serialized Novels Zhu Yuanyuan (bio) Charles Dickens’s allusive and thematic use of the Bible in his novels and other writings has caught critical attention over the past four decades, resulting in studies that either explore his personal belief and his attitude towards religious and theological issues,1 or interpret his texts’ themes, characters, or narratives by examining their connections with biblical counterparts.2 Most recently, Jennifer Gribble’s Dickens and the Bible: “What Providence Meant” (2021) has explored how Dickens engages the Judeo-Christian grand narrative in his novels in dialogue with other contemporary narratives. However, critical examination of biblical allusion in Dickens’s novels has overlooked the aspect of serial publication that shaped how his contemporary readers would have approached and read his works. Each of the three novels under consideration in this article was serialized either in Dickens’s weekly magazine Household Words (Hard Times) or in separate monthly instalments (Bleak House and Little Dorrit). This article aims to theorize both explicit and implicit use of biblical allusion and its workings in the opening numbers of these three novels as structural and thematic tools that help organize oppositional stances embodied in characters and institutions and that foster active reading by drawing upon the reader’s familiarity with the Bible.3 [End Page 155] My analysis of biblical allusion in the opening numbers of these serialized novels is based on the assumption that Dickens’s contemporary readers were indeed familiar with the Bible, in spite of the fact that the nineteenth century witnessed the process of secularization, with the status of the Bible being challenged by a number of factors, including the Higher Criticism and the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species.4 In fact, by the mid-eighteenth century, communal and individual readings of the Bible together with Bunyan’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress and Milton’s Paradise Lost had become common in many families. In the nineteenth century, in addition to the practice of family prayers, daily Bible study, and exegesis in family circles, Bible readings became part of the curriculum in grammar schools.5 Therefore, we may assume that Dickens and his readers shared a biblical literacy that was the prerequisite for the novelist to incorporate biblical allusions and stimulate the reader’s participation in the process of interpretation. An “imagined community,” to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term (46),6 can be thought of as existing between the novelist and his readers, as well as among the readers themselves, because of the cultural resonance realized by reading and sharing common cultural discourses.7 Each instance of allusion to the Bible engages the reader’s judgment through their efforts in recognition and interpretation. The aesthetic appreciation of an allusion involves an effective “exchange” and forges “intimacy and community” between the novelist and his reader, to use William Irwin’s terms (530). The use of biblical allusions in the opening numbers of serial fiction intensifies such cultural experience. My analysis has also been informed by the concept of biblical typology, defined by George P. Landow as “a Christian form of scriptural interpretation [End Page 156] that claims to discover divinely intended anticipations of Christ and His dispensation in the laws, events, and people of the Old Testament” (3). As Landow shows how the Victorians transfer “habits of mind derived from interpreting the Bible” to “contemporary politics, literary characterization […] and other areas of thought apparently far distant from theological studies” (15), my article will show such typological habits of mind are also transferred to Dickens’s literary production. I shall argue that in the opening numbers of Hard Times, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit, novels about contemporary social problems, Dickens draws on biblical allusions to construct “types” that foreshadow and prefigure certain aspects; or, put differently, “types” that the novels will fulfil. Dickens’s novels of the 1850s critique social problems and individual failings, and suggest their connection. The criticism of the Court of Chancery in Bleak House and of utilitarian educational theories in Hard Times set up these novels’ moral stance in opposition to idolatrous practices, similar to Little Dorrit’s...

Abstract: In Bleak House (1852–1853) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), Charles Dickens draws analogies between human beings and bees, which function as an important means to address social and moral problems of Victorian society. This article shows how references to bees expose the hedonistic version of psychological egoism represented by Skimpole's drone philosophy in Bleak House and how Dickens attacks the evils of insatiable greed underlying the ideology of the middle-class "economic man" implied by the worker-bee analogy in Our Mutual Friend . I argue that the Mandevillian tension between private interests and public benefits underlies Dickens's allegorical representation of bees.

Charles Dickens consistently evaluates the socio-economic and political conditions of England and reports on cultural developments. In Bleak House, Dickens shed light on some crucial social, political and legal problems found in the systems that governed Victorian English cities and rural areas. Dickens, however, has seen a silver lining in the value of Home and the image of the philanthropist. In this paper, I argue that Dickens portrays England in Bleak House as an antithetical country holding both utopian and anti-utopian notions. The utopian element is symbolized in the ideal house of John Jarndyce, although there are glimpses of anti-utopian techniques within in it. The anti-utopian notions, epitomized in the social and legal conditions of Victorian England, may hold utopian traces, but they also surround the idealistic state and penetrate to disturb its perfect image leading the readers to question the future of real utopian elements in England at that time.

If you were to ask your students what century is best known for its environmental and social problems, what would they say? Most likely, they would say 21st century. This is true; however, there is another century worth examining when environmental issues affected societies. Charles Dickens lived during the best and worst of times in 19th century England. His writings were greatly influenced by the ongoing industrial revolution. He described abhorrent environmental conditions, inadequate sanitary practices, abuse, and other social maladies of the times. But, wait ... why should we bring Dickens into the biology classroom? Fiction dealing with our environment can strengthen and broaden the real-life experiences of a child (Powers, 1974, p. 16). By having Dickens in the biology classroom, our students can discover that pollution, abuse, infectious diseases, and poor sanitary practices are not just 21st century problems: If students are stimulated by interesting past events, they could also study scenarios of future social patterns and values to initiate student interest in socialization. Reynolds, 1983, p. 407 Dickens' readings provide students with the opportunity to discuss such issues as: Will people continue to make the same mistakes in the future as they did in the past? How can people avoid the mistakes? What role will humanitarian causes play in making societal decisions? Dickens' writings can initiate discussions, debates, role-plays, and essays dealing with people vs. technology, nature vs. technology, and people vs. nature, among other topics (Fleener & Bucher, 2003). Dickens & the Environment When you discuss environmental issues (such as pollution, sanitation, infectious diseases, and housing conditions), provide your students with any of the following excerpts from Dickens' writings. In the following paragraph from Hard Times, Dickens describes the pollution of Coketown: It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a ratline and trembling all day long. Dickens, 1959, p. 34 The effects of air pollution in London are described in Our Mutual Friend, by writing Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing and choking; inanimate London was snooting spectre (Dickens, 1964, p. 21). Dickens discussed sanitation issues frequently in his writings. He served as a reporter for the True Sun and then the Morning Chronicle. During this time, he became familiar with the legislation focusing on the poor. Edwin Chadwick was the Secretary to the Poor Law Commission. In 1834, all 15,000 parishes in England were responsible for looking after their own poor. No single system existed. The Poor Law Report of 1834 barely mentioned sanitary conditions and water quality found in the poorest areas of England. Dickens did not support the new Poor Law and became cynical about the politics in his country. In Bleak House, he wrote: Now, these tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery. As on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards: and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and The Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred year-though born expressly to do it. …

ARTICLES THE W/HOLE REMAINS: CONSUMERIST POLITICS IN BLEAK HOUSE, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, AND OUR MUTUAL FRIEND MONIKA RYDYGIER SMITH University of Victoria Tropes of consumption (or implicit consumption) saturate the narrative texture of Bleak House (1853), Great Expectations (1861), and Our Mutual Friend (1865). In Bleak House, for example, the Smallweeds itemize the contents of Krook's Store with "ravenous little pens" (524); Chancery lawyers prosper "like maggots in nuts" (182); while Vholes's blue bags are "hastily stuffed, out of all regularity of form, as the larger sort of serpents are in their first gorged state" (605). In Great Expectations Miss Havisham anticipates that with her death, relatives will "come to feast upon me" (116); and when Orlik (whose name connotes distinctly oral activities) threatens to murder Pip, it seems to Pip that "he drew [his hand] across his mouth as if his mouth watered for me" (436). In Our Mutual Friend, likewise, a strain of images associated with feeding multiplies throughout the narrative. Wegg, for example, is figured as a human gastropod, living upon Cavendish House "with the air of a leech . . . that had 'taken' wonderfully" (88); while the description of Boffin's Bower as a "Dismal Swamp" has the effect, semantically, of reducing trades-people and fortune-hunters to little more than swimming stomachs — "fish of the shark tribe" and "Alligators" — and their commercial hopes to mere gastric impulse: they "[lie] by to drag the Golden Dustman under" (262). Victorian Review 19.1 (Summer 1993) Victorian Review The extent to which Dickens's narratives — ostensibly the plotting of stories — are in fact constructed from tropes of consumption is remarkable. The significance, however, of this proliferation of images, both as narrative strategy and mode of representation, is best approached through a consideration of the context that produced it; for I take it as a critical axiom that genre is political: that the construction of actions and subjectivities in fiction is related to conditions of literary production outside the text. Taking this relationship into account, particularly the way in which mechanisms of silencing in the nineteenth century influenced textual practice, my intention is to demonstrate that the semantic splicings generated by Dickens's metaphoric configuring of character and action specifically in terms of eater and eaten provide a potent means of narrative contra/diction: an other way of describing what cannot be directly related. When Disraeli observed in Coningsby (1844) that "there are yet great truths to tell if we had ... the temper to receive them" (142), he was commenting on the way Victorian notions of propriety, "a nebulous, but powerful system of ideas and social practices" (O'Neill 8), operated to create an atmosphere of censorship, limiting the scope of fiction as a forum for public debate, not simply in terms of sexual matters, but also with regard to pressing social problems. Because of its focus on maintaining "appearances," especially the appearance of civility and decorum, propriety helped foster the idea that decent, ethical behavior was the active agent in shaping a generally cohesive society. In this respect, as Philip O'Neill demonstrates in his study of Wilkie Collins, Victorian propriety served "the factional interest of property" (8), for it helped quash discussion (and thus hinder perception) of the social tensions and conflicts generated by a system of proprietorship favoring middle- and upper-class males at the expense of every other social group. The kinds of silences imposed by the successful manipulation of this social code, cloaking class and gender based problems in a kind of invisibility, fed directly into "the strenuous effort" of England's prosperous elite "to maintain the facade of a harmonious and stable system" (Barickman, MacDonald, and Stark 7). Encouraging attitudes intolerant of specific kinds of discourse — such as depictions of hunger and homelessness, rage and rebellion — propriety was complicit in silencing voices of opposition and dissent, and by extension obviating social realities which did not conform to the world of "appearances": the illusion that England was a nation of mutually prosperous classes. Part and parcel of the propertied, bourgeois attitude, Victorian standards of propriety operated, in short, as an ideological mechanism which, by structuring areas of ignorance in the public mind, served the...

American Creed valuations more readily endorsed than specific ones with situational relevance, but the degree to which a given item represents a fait accompli for the respondent seems to be a factor in determining whether the majority of the sample accept or reject it. This finding supports the definition of the situation interpretation of race relations favored by Lohman and Reitzes, Blumer, Killian, Rose and others.11 Where the formal group structure defines a given action in clear-cut terms and where these definitions are acted out by most of the members, then an individual's valuations (or attitudes, as the case may be) tend to follow even though initially he might have preferred a different state of affairs. Table 2 summarizes the amount of agreement and disagreement for the ten itempairs. Each person responded to ten itempairs for a total of 1030 paired responses. Of these, 647 were consistent, the subjects agreeing or disagreeing with both sides of a given item-pair. No dilemma is indicated in these response-pairs. remaining 383 response-pairs were inconsistent, indicating a potential dilemma. Whether a dilemma exists, however, depends on the respondent's reactions to his own inconsistencies. Analysis of response patterns rather than individuals facilitates statistical treatment of the data where multiple responses are permitted, but it does raise a question as to J Joseph D. Lohman and Dietrich C. Reitzes, Note on Race Relations in Mass Society, op. cit., and Deliberately Organized Groups and Racial Behavior, American Sociological Review, 19 (1954), pp. 342-348; Herbert Blumer, and the Social Act, Social Problems, 3 (1955), pp. 59-65; Arnold M. Rose, Intergroups Relations vs. Prejudice: Pertinent Theory for the Study of Social Change, Social Problems, 4 (1956), pp. 173-176 and Inconsistencies in Attitudes Toward Negro Housing, Social Problems, 8 (1961), pp. 286-293; and Lewis M. Killian, The Effects of Southern White Workers on Race Relations in Northern Plants, American Sociological Review, 17 (1952),

<i>Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution</i>. Ian Duncan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii+290.

Review

49? Reviews which extensively use devices of foreshadowing, change, and ambiguous chaptertitles . Convincing are the 'paired protagonists' oiHard Times, as well as the detailed discussion of Great Expectations, of the intricate web of coincidence which unexpectedly links characters and situations, and guides, through the coincidental last meeting of Pip and Estella, to their partially happy ending. In the analysis of Bleak House, Friedman again refers to Oliver Twist as a model for plotlines, episodes, and characters; if on the one hand this approach underlines the importance of the juvenile novel, which Dickens keeps resorting to until the end of his life, on the other, the critical risk implied is not to be undervalued. Drawing Bleak House back to the past, instead of forward to the future, means to limit its extraordinary structural and thematic novelty. Even if Tom-all-Alone's undeniably depends on Jacob's Island, its similarities with Manette's St Antoine, with the echoes reproduced in Jasper's East End, are much more intriguing, projected, as they are, into the split structures of A Tale of Two Cities and The Mystery ofEdwin Drood. In Our Mutual Friend Friedman is mainly concerned with the father figure, a favourite theme with Dickens, here exemplified by the symmetrical, complementary, amazingly similar characters of Boffinand Riah. On their childlessness, role-playing, and benevolence depends the structural complexity of the plot, and through their positivity, argues Friedman, Dickens elaborates his own emotions, reviewing the pre? vious critical opinion of his father.This reassuring perspective removes crucial signs of splits and doubles. Even ifsome tensions of the plot are resolved through goodness and disinterestedness, other questions remain unsolved. How should we interpret, for instance, the name the protagonist John Harmon inherits from his father; the relation between identical names and opposing characters; the harmony hinted at in the surname? Dickens's fiction is far too complex to accept the succession of father and son as a simple reversal from bad to good; the more so, if we remember that the name of Dickens's father was also John. In the last section of the book, 'Resolutions and Implications', Friedman signifi? cantly points out the doubtful workings of poetic justice, the unresolved situations, the unredeemed characters; nevertheless, his conclusion again sounds too comforting, in the stress he lays on stories imparting hope, on a moral stance 'favouring honesty and kindness, and attacking deceit and cruelty'. This optimistic outlook I find unsatisfactory ,not only in relation to some of the novels discussed in the book, but above all in relation to the texts excluded from it. George Silverman's Explanation, Sikes and Nancy, Edwin Drood, extreme occurrences of the ambiguity of words, of the erasing of possible happy ends, of extraordinary, undecipherable doublings, leave no doubt as to the obscure way Dickens had chosen for his art. University of Udine Marisa Sestito The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt. By Caro? line Levine. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. 2003. xii + 237pp. ?29.50. ISBN 0-8139-2217-8. Recent criticism of Victorian fiction has made welcome progress in removing the defensive scare quotes from 'realism'. The theoretically informed arguments of such books as Harry Shaw's Narrating Reality have loosened the hold of notions like Barthes's 'classic realist text' or Foucault's panoptic discipline, enabling us to set aside condescending or suspicious assumptions that nineteenth-century realism was hopelessly naive or enthralled to bourgeois ideology and so to appreciate its complex achievements in new ways. Caroline Levine presents her study as a contribution to this reappraisal, contesting the view that narrative suspense creates uncertainty only MLRy 100.2, 2005 491 to reinstate normalizing order, that it represses social anxieties 'in favor of unambiguous disclosures and soothing restorations of the status quo'. Instead, she claims that 'Victorian writers and readers understood suspenseful narrative as a stimulus to active speculation', that 'suspense fiction was all about teaching readers to suspend judgment', and therefore that 'the classic readerly text was [. . .] far more writerly? dynamic, critical, questioning, and indeterminate?than Barthes ever tempts us to imagine' (p. 2). 'At the center of this book', Levine emphasizes, 'is the claim that suspense and realism...

Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other's creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars.Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other's novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity, the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by undercutting someone else's -- usually Charles Dickens's.Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside. Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for expressing too negative a world view.For his part, Dickens -- determined to remain inimitable -- replied to all of his rivals by redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and situations to make their own statements and to discredit his.Thus Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelist read and rewrote each other's work, this innovative study alters present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as Felix Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, Woman in White, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

In Imagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels, Pam Morris traces a dramatic transformation of British public consciousness that occurred between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867. This brief period saw a shift from a naturalized acceptance of social hierarchy to a general imagining of a modern mass culture. Central to this collective revisioning of social relations was the pressure to restyle political leadership in terms of popular legitimacy, to develop a more inclusive mode of discourse within an increasingly heterogeneous public sphere and to find new ways of inscribing social distinctions and exclusions. Morris argues that in the transformed public sphere of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the urbane of civility collapsed under the strain of the conflicting interests that constitute mass society. It was replaced by a code of sincerity, often manipulative and always ideological in that its inclusiveness was based upon a formally egalitarian assumption of mutual interiorities. The irresistible movement toward mass politics shifted the location of power into the public domain. Increasingly, national leaders sought to gain legitimacy by projecting a performance of charismatic as a flattering and insinuating mode of address to mass audiences. Yet, by the latter decades of the century, while the of sincerity continued to dominate popular and political culture, traditional political and intellectual elites were reinscribing social distinctions and exclusions. They did so both culturally-by articulating sensibility as skepticism, irony, and aestheticism-and scientifically-by introducing evolutionist notions of sensibility and attaching these to a rigorous disciplinary of bodily visuality. Through an intensive, intertextual reading of six key novels (Bronte's Shirley, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Dickens's Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, Gaskell's North and South, and Eliot's Romola) and an array of Victorian periodicals and political essays, Morris analyzes just how actively novelists engaged in these social transformations. Drawing on a wide range of literary, cultural, and historical thinkers-Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Benedict Anderson, Mary Poovey, and Charles Tilly-Morris makes an original and highly sophisticated contribution to our understanding of the complex and always contested processes of imagining social inclusiveness.

A starting point for the Lahti research is that social problems are conceptual constructions. Any sociological intervention, in fact any reasonable sociological theory, must assume that some kind of communicability is the foundation of the social order, whatever its nature and whatever its degree of consensus.

East Asian Studies: Society

This email interview with James B. Jacobs was conducted during 2014. As a law student at University of Chicago in the early 1970s, Jacobs conducted a participant observation study at Stateville Penitentiary, Illinois’ largest and most notorious maximum security prison. That research resulted in his first major publication, “Street Gangs Behind Bars” published in Social Problems (1973). In 1975, after receiving his J.D. and Ph.D. (Sociology), Jacobs joined Cornell University as assistant professor of law and sociology. In 1977, the University of Chicago Press published his revised doctoral dissertation, Stateville; The Penitentiary in Mass Society (1977). In 1982, Jacobs moved to New York University (NYU) as professor of law and director of the Center for Research in Crime and Justice. In the mid 1980s, he served as consultant to the New York State Organized Crime Task Force’s investigation of corruption and racketeering in NYC’s construction industry. Jacobs was the draftsman of OCTF’s Final Report on Corruption and Racketeering in NYC’s Construction Industry (NYU Press, 1990). He subsequently published four additional volumes on organized crime and organized crime control, most recently Breaking the Devil’s Pact: The Battle to Free the Teamsters from the Mob (2011).

Introduction:Arendt, Terror and Cliché Steven Maloney (bio) and Joshua A. Miller (bio) Hannah Arendt often used cliché as a window into the public understanding of an event or social problem. Phrases such as, "better dead than red", "forced integration is no better than forced segregation" and "you cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs" are all taken by Arendt as provocations to examine public thoughtlessness on matters that call for serious political judgment. In her work on mass societies, Arendt explored the relationship between totalitarian terror and the clichés and how they facilitated ordinary people to commit atrocities. Perhaps Arendt's most poignant expression of this problem is in Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she notes that Eichmann's last words evoked "the cliché used in funeral oratory.... He forgot that this was his own funeral." This inimical connection between cliché and thoughtlessness became one of the lenses through which she considered the crises of her new republic. Certainly, the world has changed since Arendt's death. Technology has transfigured our understanding of terror, citizenship, and responsibility, as well as our notion of which interventions might stay the course of ruin. Yet this situation is not so different from that which Arendt confronted in The Human Condition, when "the ability to destroy all organic life on earth" was juxtaposed with "a world where speech had lost its power." As our destructive capacities increase, new bureaucracies and networks of ruin have supplanted the threat of atomic annihilation that Arendt feared. It seems that bureaucratic thoughtlessness has once again succeeded in rendering speech, deliberation, and consent impotent, just as it seemed in Arendt's time. The revelation that it is possible for nineteen motivated and well-funded people to kill thousands has triggered the revival and repackaging of old clichés: "9/11 changed everything," "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality" or "They hate us for our freedoms." The political decisions required in the face of recent traumas have been made by a stupefied public, overwhelmed by acts so novel, that, the clichés tell us, the world they have created is utterly incomprehensible using the lessons of the past or the judgments of history. We believe that the Arendt, who autopsied the hazy thinking and self-deception that guided the Vietnam War in "Lying in Politics" would not have remained silent during these tumultuous times. In her absence, we invited the contributors to discuss these dark times in a similar vein. We suspect that we can discern much about contemporary problems by clarifying Arendt's understanding of the relationship of language and judgment generally, and her judgments more specifically on topics such as isonomy, membership, and collective responsibility. If the cliché serves to short-circuit judgment, then only thoughtful institutions can re-wire the damaged trains of thought and jump-start our self-reflection. After all, our institutions owe us more than results in these changing times: they must also provide the space to judge what has happened and what should be done. For this symposium, we asked the contributors to reflect on how the work of Hannah Arendt could be applied in an age presented with the idea of "War on Terror." We gave no restrictions except to request that they focus on Arendt's own explorations of cliché and responsibility as they relate to the contemporary tension between terror and judgment. Peg Birmingham elaborates the fundamental challenge of rhetoric to political thought in the present age. Her account of the development of political lying in Arendt's work follows Arendt's account of the history of deception and the modern form that such dissembling has taken since the rise of totalitarianism, which she analogizes to "arguing with a potential murderer over whether the future victim is dead or alive," an argument settled when the murderer shoots the victim. Birmingham diagnoses the efficacy of current rhetoric as hazarding what Arendt called a 'lying world order,' in which reality is criminalized and truth is remolded through a quick and dirty act of violence. She charges modern political deceivers with authorial hubris, the illusion that we can control both our actions...