End Of Tragedy Research Articles

THE INNER CONFLICT: CONSCIENCE OR STATE'S RULE

Conflict is part of human life. No one can get rid of it. Some conflicts end in good resolution, some end in bad resolution, and some end in tragedy. Antigone, the main character, is encountering a dilemma of whether to keep on the conscience of burying her brother or to obey her king’s edict forbidding her to bury him otherwise death sentence she has to bear. This inner conflict represents the power relation between Antigone and the king. Foucault proposes that power relation comprises the productivity of power and the constitution of subjectivity. He also says that resistance is an endemic fact in the world of power relations. Furthermore, Kabeer states that the power of women signifies the ability of women to make choices. In determining choices, Antigone experiences inner conflict, and thus, she encounters a double struggle, i.e., against herself and against Creon, the king. With the knowledge that conscience or heaven's values are higher than man’s rule or earth’s values, Antigone seizes her power to deal with her conflicts. The conflict between Antigone and Creon, which is first between heaven and earth laws, turns out to be a conflict mostly covered by self-pride. This contestation of power leads her to agony and suicide, and this confirms that inner conflicts in power relations may end in tragedy.

Queer Korea

Queer Korea

Reimagining the Prophet: Teiresias as Comedian and Sophist in Euripides’ Bacchae

This article analyses the role of the prophet Teiresias in the Bacchae of Euripides in the particular context of sophistic influence. It views the originality of the prophet’s depiction as reflective of Euripides’ creative self-consciousness within an agonistic genre that relied on the malleability of ancient myth, particularly towards the end of tragedy’s “golden era”. Our particular aim is to present the prophet independently of the Sophoсlean background against which Teiresias is often viewed, and as a more complex figure than a (not especially satisfactory) radicalization of his earlier incarnations. The prophet in Bacchae is a liminal figure poised between tragedy and comedy, man and god, male and female, tradition and innovation. As such he parallelsmany of the “doublings” characteristic of Dionysus himself. The analysis re-examines the extent and nature of the comedy in the early Teiresias–Cadmus–Pentheus scene (170–369) in the context of the most recent scholarship. It then offers a close examination of the so-called sophistic speech by the prophet (266–327) within the framework of contemporary attitudes to sophism and how this has unfairly influenced scholarly perception of Teiresias’s authority as a dramatic character. The argument aims to establish Teiresias’s incarnation as both fifth-century intellectual and representative of traditional values. He thus reflects the tension between old and new in the integration of Dionysiac religion in mythical Thebes.

Marian Literary Culture: Lydgate, his Heirs, and the End of Tragedy

Marian Literary Culture: Lydgate, his Heirs, and the End of Tragedy

The Fable of the Beetle in Contemporary Aramaic and Kurmanji

Abstract The fable of an insect and a mouse (or some other animal), who marry and embark on a life together, only to end in tragedy, is widely disseminated from the Mediterranean region to India. One version involving a beetle (Ṭuroyo keze, Kurmanji kêz) circulates throughout Anatolia and Iraq. The following Ṭuroyo and Kurmanji version was recorded during the 2020 summer field season of the Russian expedition to Ṭur Abdin in the village of Dērqube from a speaker of the Bequsyone dialect. She relates the narrative portions of the fable in Ṭuroyo, but switches to Kurmanji for its versified portions. In addition to the text and a translation, this study includes an interlinear glossing. It also discusses the motifs of the fable according to the standard classification scheme, as well as its relationship to other attested versions collected in various languages including Arabic, Kurmanji, and Turkish.

“Race”, Language and Xenophobia in Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster”

Summary Chinua Achebe’s animus against the creator of Heart of Darkness did not simply end with the charge of racism but extended to anti-Semitism and xenophobia as well. The term “xenophobia”, which is imbricated in the dialectics of race and language, features strongly in the current politics of diaspora and identity. Conventional scholarship on Conrad’s short fiction “Amy Foster” has followed two predominant strands, namely, the extreme loneliness of Yanko Goorall, the central protagonist of this seemingly mis-titled story, and his inability to communicate in a foreign land. This article, from the hermeneutic space afforded by postcoloniality, postulates the construct of “race”, as understood in the nineteenth century, as a major catalyst in the breakdown in the marriage of Yanko and Amy. It holds to the view that the tragedy of the former is not so much the outcome of a lack of communication between a castaway and his local English wife, but is predetermined in the face of an ethnocentric, if not rampantly “racist” insular, parochial community. The article concludes that the story is Conrad’s study of the racist recesses of the human psyche which manifest in discrimination against the other. Displaced geographically, culturally and linguistically, Yanko (like Conrad himself) is a metonymic inscription of alterity, whose attempts to reclaim his linguistic and cultural identity end in tragedy.

O KITSCH NA EPISTEMOLOGIA DO ROMANCE

O presente artigo tem como objetivo apresentar o conceito de kitsch como conceito estético e ontológico na perspectiva teórica da Epistemologia do Romance. Para a Epistemologia do Romance, a palavra kitsch é associada ao pensamento de Milan Kundera acerca do que ele chama de necessidade da mentira embelezante para satisfação de si. A Epistemologia do Romance ampara-se à ideia kunderiana de ocultação da “merda” como um ideal estético do ser em que o kitsch, como forma estética da negação de questões da condição humana, lida com aquilo que Hermann Broch define como ausência de reflexão ética no contexto da estética, fomentado pela necessidade do efeito estético agradável. Para a Epistemologia do Romance, o kitsch é a forma estética do idílio. Buscando assim uma falsa beleza e harmonia que trouxesse uma sensação de paz e fim da tragédia.

La legislación catalana sobre refugiados de guerra durante la guerra civil

Durante la guerra civil española tuvo lugar, en el territorio bajo control de las autoridades republicanas, el desplazamiento de centenares de miles de personas desde sus hogares hacia otras poblaciones que se encontraban alejadas de las zonas de guerra. Una de ellas fue Cataluña, a donde llegaron los primeros evacuados, niños procedentes de Madrid y del frente de Aragón, entre los meses de agosto y octubre de 1936. El gobierno de la Generalitat tuvo que hacer frente a esta situación mediante una serie de disposiciones que fue organizando la acogida, manutención y organización de aquellas personas que, según diversas fuentes, llegó a alcanzar la cifra de cerca de un millón en 1938. El presente trabajo expone la legislación producida por el gobierno de Cataluña enmarcándola en el contexto de la situación política existente tanto en la retaguardia como en los frentes de batalla. Asimismo, se hace referencia al coste económico que significó su atención tomando como fuente las disposiciones aparecidas en el «Diari Oficial de la Generalitat de Catalunya». Hay que resaltar, finalmente, el auxilio que prestaron los ayuntamientos a aquellas personas, un hecho que fue esencial para evitar que el drama que significaba la situación de la población refugiada acabara en tragedia.

Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River by Max McCoy

Reviewed by: Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River by Max McCoy Michael Farrell Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River. By Max McCoy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018. ix + 306 pp. Illustrations. $27.95 cloth. At the book's outset it looks like Max McCoy is going to take us on a fairly predictable trip down the Arkansas via kayak, or by jeep or on foot where he can't float, and tell us the natural history of this major river that rises in the Rockies and eventually joins the Missouri after crossing the plains of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and on into Arkansas. Very soon it becomes apparent that is not, broadly speaking, where we're headed. McCoy uses the natural eastward flow of the Arkansas River as the prime organizing principle for his narrative, but we soon begin to realize that, just like biographies of complex individuals, the life story of this river contains a mix of tragedy, heroism, humor, and, in McCoy's case, the opportunity to confront and wrestle with personal demons and failings. Max McCoy is a writing and journalism associate professor at Emporia State University in Kansas. He was raised near the Oklahoma border in Baxter Springs on a tributary of the Arkansas and recounts early formative experiences fishing with his dad on area streams that led to his fascination with watersheds. Born in 1958, he's spent a career in journalism, with stints in near-by Missouri and overseas in Japan. He's best known for his western fiction work and for his reporting on hate groups and serial killers. So this work is a departure for him. Perhaps his motivations for taking up the challenge to traverse a watershed from top to bottom are in response to the fact that he is now entering his seventh decade, and the road ahead is shrinking as the rear view expands. There is nothing like a harsh physical challenge to make you feel alive, if you survive it. Because McCoy views the world through his hard-edged journalist's eyes, he tends to seek out and highlight stories that end in tragedy or are tinged with the scent of human failings. If we can think of a river as a person with an infinite set of stories, then McCoy sees this river's personhood through his own filters, emphasizing aspects of its history and bringing to the fore both historic and contemporary events that strike him as pertinent, telling, and reflective of our common social reality in the age of Trump (whom he reviles). We learn of kayak drownings, the ill-fated Pike Expedition of 1806, the Sand Creek Massacre, Dodge City's Boot Hill, where lonesome cowboys and soiled doves are buried, the recent plot by white nationalists to blow up a Somali convenience store, and the region's earthquakes that are now commonplace due to the underground disposal of the residue waters caused by fracking— and a few unsavory shoreline encounters with guntoting yahoos thrown in. McCoy is a gifted storyteller, and his take on his subjects veers away from the tendency of journalists to [End Page 47] maintain some bogus sense of "objectivity." We know who he is and where he stands in relation to his subjects. And the Arkansas, like the author, is full of interesting stories made more compelling for the scars. Michael Farrell Platte Basin Timelapse University of Nebraska–Lincoln Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560–1640 by Reinier H. Hesselink

Reviewed by: The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560–1640 by Reinier H. Hesselink Lane R. Earns The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560–1640. By Reinier H. Hesselink. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016. 300pages. Softcover $49.95. Reinier Hesselink’s book represents a prodigious effort to confront the complexity of issues involved in writing a history of early Christian Nagasaki and demonstrates the multifarious skills required to do so effectively. To accomplish his ambitious task, it was necessary for Hesselink to research Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian missionaries (Jesuit, Franciscan, Augustinian, and Dominican) and traders who came to Japan via India, Southeast Asia, China, the Philippines, and Mexico to spread word of the [End Page 76] Catholic Reformation and gain riches by filling a void in the lucrative world and regional silver trade. And this work was just on the European side; the author, of course, also had to navigate numerous contemporaneous Japanese documents generated at the central and local levels. The introduction of Christianity into Japan, and specifically Nagasaki, depended on Jesuit missionaries serving as trade and cultural intermediaries between southern European traders on the one hand and Japanese political, military, and merchant officials on the other. This strategy proved to be dangerous in the long run, however, as it resulted in the exile, torture, and sometimes death of not only European missionaries but many of their Japanese Christian followers as well. While it took less than a century for the Christian vision to end in tragedy for the missionaries and converts, for Japanese leaders the Christian encounter ultimately endowed them with primacy over the country’s foreign trade and political, military, and administrative dominance over the territory of Nagasaki. It also led to Japanese control measures that eliminated Christianity in the port town and sent surviving Japanese Christians underground into rural hamlets, coastal towns, and sparsely populated islands in the region. Hesselink lays out the book’s theme in the opening statement of his introduction: “This is the story of the birth of the city of Nagasaki, where two different worlds [Japan on one side and Portugal and Spain on the other] intersected in a prolonged and intensive manner” (p. 1), most intensely in the arenas of trade and religion (and possibly political administrative control). Through military might, the Portuguese established trading posts and administrative centers for their sea-based empire in Arabia, India, Southeast Asia, and China before making their way to Japan in search of a trading entrepôt in Kyushu. They eventually established a port town at Nagasaki, which allowed them to fill the vacuum of trade for Chinese silk and Japanese silver that had been opened up following the Ming government’s crackdown on rampant piracy in the area. The Society of Jesus, then recently established, took the lead in spreading Catholicism to Asia and, as in Europe and the Americas, had considerable early success converting the upper classes, who in turn forced the conversion of others in their territories. In Japan, this meant that the Jesuits not only tried to convert the samurai, especially the daimyo, but at times even behaved as samurai themselves. To Hesselink, the Jesuits “became the founders of a military colony, called Nagasaki” (p. 4). Soon, however, their strategy presented problems, in that the “Society of Jesus ostensibly [was] dedicated to spiritual goals and its priests in Japan [had] founded a strategic stronghold dedicated to monopolizing the China trade brought by the Portuguese merchants. Without the China trade, it was impossible for the mission to survive in Japan” (p. 5). This contradiction, between faith and trade, eventually led to the Society’s downfall in Japan. It also contributes to one of Hesselink’s primary challenges in the book: he claims the Jesuits’ positioning between economic and religious interests makes their records ultimately historically unreliable because they tried to deny, or at least dramatically downplay, their role in the temporal affairs of Kyushu and Nagasaki. [End Page 77] Hesselink organizes the book into three overarching chronological parts, each composed of subsections assigned a topical title and a representative individual. While this framework offers a structured and personalized approach...

Tromeo & Juliet, Teen Films, and the Cinematic Aesthetic of Un-Cuteness

As Romeo and Juliet has shifted from an adult tragedy involving young persons to basically a YA classic, so too have the aesthetic modes of representation and appropriation shifted in ways reflective of modernism’s transition to postmodernism. Unlike that originary appropriation of Romeo and Juliet, for example—involving the golden statues whose opulence is designed to provoke awe in onlookers—cinematic appropriations tend to trade in the postmodern aesthetic language of the “cute,” which is more likely to appeal to the superiority of onlookers. When unchecked or unreflective, such cute cinematic Romeos and Juliets appear merely to collude with conservative cultural and educational agendas whose goal is to socialize youth. In this reading, cute appropriations prove to be particularly insidious, revealing much about the strategic functions of adult misrepresentations of youth—and effacing the historical, social, and psychological pressures that can, and often do, end in tragedy. This essay argues that Lloyd Kauffman’s Tromeo & Juliet (1996) responds to the cute-ification of Shakespeare. By contextualizing Kauffman’s film within the emergence of teen pic genre of the late 1980s and early 1990s, this essay argues that Tromeo’s main goal—beyond simply shocking, grossing out, and titillating its viewers—is to save Shakespeare from the mainstream market’s teenification of everything.

Communication Commentary: Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders: From Compulsions to Communication: Forming a Therapeutic Alliance With Individuals Diagnosed With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Communication Commentary: Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders: From Compulsions to Communication: Forming a Therapeutic Alliance With Individuals Diagnosed With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Fire from Heaven in Elemental Tragedy: From Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles to Nietzsche’s Dying Socrates

The paper considers the legacy of Empedocles as it bears upon the difficulty confronted by Hölderlin in his Death of Empedocles: how are we to understand Hölderlin’s failure to complete this ‘mourning play’ despite his continued and repeated efforts? This difficulty is elaborated through a reading of Hölderlin’s own understanding of “elemental tragedy” as it is presented and developed in the three dense so-called Homburg essays on tragedy. It is evident that the understanding of tragedy that emerges here entails a dramatic poetry that would break with the prevailing tradition and its determination of poetry according to a mimetic operation. Aristotle’s own account of Empedocles and his apparent refusal to consider Empedocles as a poet is considered alongside other ancient accounts of Empedoclean poetry, notably those provided by Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, and Lucretius. In this context, Nietzsche’s account of the end of tragedy through his interpretation of another philosophical death, that of Socrates, is introduced as a counterpoint to help elucidate the difficulties faced by Hölderlin. This Nietzschean account of ‘the image of the dying Socrates’ also proves to be related to Nietzsche’s own brief but provocative statements concerning what is eclipsed with the loss of Empedoclean tragic philosophy and emergence of Socratism. The paper concludes by returning to Hölderlin’s letters to Böhlendorff as these letters make thematic an ‘elemental’ difference in the impossible recovery of the tragic in our time.

American Red Cross Scientific Advisory Council: Guidelines for Group Aquatic Outings

Drowning is a leading cause of accidental death that disproportionately affects children. Though drowning deaths do not occur in epidemic proportions, the drowning of even one child is an incomprehensible tragedy and immeasurable loss to the parents and family. Much has been written about ways to prevent childhood drowning. Strategies include but are not limited to secure fencing, lifeguard supervision, lifejackets for weak or nonswimmers, learning to swim, and, most importantly, parental supervision. But what of the times when parents are not part of the solution providing supervision-times such as when the child is at school or with a daycare provider. Each year, as schools come to a close, teachers search for fun and exciting activities for that last field trip of the year, and daycare agencies and child service providers are organizing summer activities. One of the most popular activities is an aquatic outing. Unfortunately, and all too often, preplanning is poor or nonexistent, and child care staff and teachers tend to rely solely on lifeguards rather than providing active supervision for their charges. The consequences of poor planning and inattention by staff can end in tragedy. In Dallas, Texas, two children nearly drowned during an aquatic outing attended by 55 other children ages 6 and 7. A 5-year-old kindergarten student drowned when he and 107 other students attended an aquatic outing at a local pool. A 7-year-old girl drowned while attending a day camp with 38 other campers and 6 counselors. These are only a few examples of the dozens of swimming pool drownings that are recorded every year in the United States between Memorial Day (May) and Labor Day (September). Should parents not have an expectation of safety when the school or daycare has charge of their child? Should parents not have an expectation that proper preplanning and adequate supervision have been addressed before an aquatic outing? The purposes of this paper are to educate parents, daycare providers, teachers, and elementary school principals about the potential risks of drowning, to provide guidelines for systematic preplanning, and to recommend ratios for staff supervision for aquatic outings. The full report is available Open Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1123/ijare.2014-0049 Language: en

Antigone at Colonus and the End(s) of Tragedy

Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, it would seem, is an exercise in closure. In the opening scene, Oedipus, worn down by years of wandering blind and hungry, arrives at the borders of Athens. Here is where his legendary sufferings—his murder of his father, his incestuous marriage to his mother, his betrayal by his sons, his exile from Thebes—are fated to end. Following his miraculous death, his body will become a sacred gift to the city that receives him, protecting it against future attack. In the closing moments of the play, everything unfolds according to plan. Oedipus disappears offstage and mysteriously descends into the earth. The king of Athens, Theseus, alone marks the spot of his disappearance, knowledge he will pass down to his sons as part of his responsibility to the city. By the end of the tragedy, then, Oedipus has made his way home to the gods in a land capable of honouring his awesome, singular fate.The concept of ‘coming home’ is integral, as this précis suggests, to the play's logic of closure. Yet, crucially, it governs only one of the two planes on which the drama unfolds, that of the gods. Oedipus' life has been in the hands of the gods since before he was born. That they reclaim him at the end of his life gives his exit the feel of a return. By contrast, the path to Athens, for all its meandering, is not circular but linear. Athens is definitively not Thebes, as the tragedy demonstrates over and over (nor is it Corinth, Oedipus' other point of origin). Thebes is, rather, the home that Oedipus rejects, most spectacularly through his resistance to Creon's demand that he return to the city of his birth. What is more, he repudiates any relationship to the Theban throne. When Polyneices arrives to ask his father to support his bid to reclaim the kingship from his brother Eteocles, Oedipus does not simply refuse to intervene but drives his son away with curses. His refusal is a refusal not just of Thebes but of the Labdacid line altogether (he goes so far as to call Polyneices ἀπάτωϱ, ‘fatherless’, 1383; see also 1369: ὑμεῖς δ' ἀπ' ἄλλον ϰοὐϰ ἐμοῦ πεϕύϰατον, ‘you are from another and not born from me’); his pact with Theseus creates an alternate genealogy of fathers and sons. Seen in this light, Oedipus' arrival at Colonus and, ultimately, his dramatic exit become the final stages of a process not of coming home but of leaving Thebes behind and with it ‘the radical tragic terrain where there can be no escape from the tragic in the resolution of conflict or in the institutional provision of a civic future beyond the world of the play’.

Bink & Gollie: Two for One (review)

Reviewed by: Bink & Gollie: Two for One Deborah Stevenson DiCamillo, Kate . Bink & Gollie: Two for One; written by Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee; illus. by Tony Fucile. Candlewick, 2012. [96p]. ISBN 978-0-7636-3361-5 $15.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 2-4. Polar-opposite friends stumpy Bink and lanky Gollie have returned, and they're off [End Page 556] to the state fair. In the first episode, Bink is determined to win at Whack a Duck but keeps beaning the game operator instead ("I fear this can only end in tragedy," says Gollie); in the second, Gollie's dream of being in a talent show turns into a nightmare; in the third, the friends visit a fairground fortuneteller. B&G again hit that sweet spot where picture books, graphic novels, and early readers converge. The text is almost entirely dialogue, the back-and-forth banter between the two girls evincing the unmistakable well-worn rhythm of a long friendship; the illustrations add dimension to the action (as in the sequence where Gollie stands mute from stage fright in front of a packed audience, with each scene drawing back farther and showing her smaller and more outnumbered), and the colored figures with their zesty lines contrast with the monochromatic backgrounds. The book follows a satisfying trajectory from the first story's slapstick through the second's pathos to conclude with the affirmation of friendship in the third, and the blend of humor and sympathetic warmth buoys the story throughout. This endearing partnership remains a treat to follow, and readers will be as delighted as Bink and Gollie about the fortune-teller-certified long-term soundness of their friendship. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Creating an Optimal Language Learning Environment

Understanding the family systems and structures of our diverse populations is one of the most important tasks of professionals in education. Children learn from their family, school, and community. They learn from their experiences by observing, talking, and interacting with their environment. Parents play a pivotal role in the education of their children. However, as illustrated by case studies that focus mostly on Asian families, cultural definitions and differences can create conflict between the family and educators—conflict that can end in tragedy. Creating a school-home educational relationship is crucial to the needs of the child. This article provides suggestions for creating and providing an optimal learning environment for children to help build a foundation for academic and life success.

The Price of the Plot in Aristotle'sPoetics

Plato's critique of imitative tribe Book X of Republic calls for a defense of poetry, and Aristotle initiates that effort Poetics. Taking his cue from Plato, he makes imitation the key concept and thus associates poetry with other kinds of representation, perhaps the single most influential move the history of Western aesthetic theory, for this set of practices corresponds, roughly speaking, to our fine arts.' The second step this defense is the identification of the art of poetry a heterogeneous group of imitative discourses that includes dramas, mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues, as well as elegiac and epic poets (47b10). What poets do, Aristotle claims, is imitate action rather than assert propositions, which means that neither scientific treatises verse nor imitations of men talking philosophy, but also fact doing it, are poems. This brusquely rejects the received idea that verse makes the poet: if someone brings out a work of medicine or natural science verse, they normally call him a poet; but there is nothing common between Homer and Empedocles except the verse-form (47b16-18). Poetry had been, as it still often is common speech, identified with verse, but a few sentences Aristotle set the course for Western poetic theory by making fictional representation the defining characteristic of poetry. The process of definition did not stop here, however, and that is where problems arise. Having identified the art of poetry, Aristotle then focused on what was highest it and thus claimed to reveal its essence, that is, its purpose: drama was superior to narrative, tragedy to comedy, and incidents, i.e. the plot, are the end of tragedy, and the end is most important of (50a23). Aristotle demotes narrative and lyric poetry and makes the other five elements of drama that he had picked out-characters, diction, reasoning, spectacle and song (50a9)-mere means. Although this may be justified the case of the last two, to make character principle unnecessary and reasoning and style (the term I shall substitute for Richard Janko's diction) the province of other arts, and thus not grounds for assessing poets, seems odd indeed. The main bad consequence of Aristotle's view is to minimize what one might call the expressive aspect of poetry (what we infer about a speaker's state of mind from his or her words). Ironically, he had silently rejected the germ of just such a theory early Poetics. In this article I want to: (1) explain why Aristotle gave such primacy to the plot, the bare story, (2) elaborate on the bad consequences of that effort, and (3) suggest how one might improve the resulting theory on the basis of his own first proposal about the nature of poetry. There is considerable agreement, even among modern Aristotelians, that there is something amiss with Aristotle's theory of poetry. Gerald Else, the author of the most distinguished modern English commentary on Poetics, says that [w]hen all is said and done, Aristotle's real conviction about words and word-magic was that they were a necessary evil, 'all imagination and there for the sake of the listener,' i.e., not for the general truths that imitations of action could provide.2 In a similar vein, Wayne Booth, speaking as Aristotle redivivus, says that in our energetic pursuit of how to discern (or

State Commission of Inquiry into the Events of October 2000: A Retrospective: Introduced by Elie Rekhess

State Commission of Inquiry into the Events of October 2000:A Retrospective: Introduced by Elie Rekhess Judge (Ret.) Theodor Or For years, there were those who contested the very notion of addressing the issue of Arabs in Israel through the tools of historical research. The host of reasons offered claimed that such practice was "premature," or pointed to the lack of a "sufficient perspective." Indeed, anyone reviewing the books, articles and research papers on the Arab population published thirty or even twenty years ago, is impressed by the paucity of research materials. Today, this trend has reversed: an impressive blossoming in the scope and types of research dealing with various issues relating to the life of the Arab population is evident, based on two main dimensions: • On the substantive level: In contrast to the first two decades of statehood, when such issues were taboo, research is no longer limited to linear analyses of historic development trends or socioeconomic changes of one kind or another: Research now includes explorations of substantive issues underlying the national character of the State of Israel as a Jewish state, and the status of its national Arab minority. • The second dimension relates to academic disciplines. Today, this topic [of the Arabs in Israel] is addressed by historians, as well as by political scientists, social psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, jurists, statisticians and demographers. Moreover, the results of these research efforts are not restricted to the academia alone. A large number of non-academic bodies have produced, and continue to produce, dozens of studies and research papers that explore diverse aspects of the social, economic and cultural life of Arabs in Israel. Work is conducted by governmental agencies—especially [End Page 23] the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Office of the State Comptroller, and various professional governmental offices; as well as by civil and human rights organizations such as Adalah (The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel), other NGOs such as Sikkuy (The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality in Israel), the Abraham Fund Initiatives and Shatil (Empowerment and Training Center), and others. As a zealous collector of every text published in the field, I can truly say that the book shelf devoted to this field is filling up, to the point that it constitutes a library in its own right. This development, however, has turned out to be a mixed blessing. Contradictions and seemingly inexplicable paradoxes are evident. The greater the public and research interest in the Arabs of Israel, the more the State of Israel has retreated, or at least stepped in place, in dealing with the complex issue of its Arab minority. I could quote numerous statistics about the growing socioeconomic gap between Jews and Arabs, the disproportionate representation of the Arab towns and villages in the lowest strata of Israel's socioeconomic ladder, the gap in allocations for education, and other disturbing figures. Why this disparity exists is the topic for a separate article. Nonetheless, we must heed the toll of this neglect, disregard, suppression and denial, especially when socioeconomic unrest in the Arab population has merged in recent years with the clear trend toward growing national awakening. It has become popular to discuss the question of how many Arabs have joined hostile organizations, and indeed, the importance of this question should not be underestimated. Nonetheless, I believe it is no less important to address the widening socioeconomic gaps, the ideological political change, and the emergence of a self-concept of Arabs in Israel who view themselves as a national minority with collective rights. Regrettably, this multi-faceted process is liable to end in tragedy. Together with other factors, this process was the root of the uprising of October 2000. At that time, as I observed that the tide of rage of the Arabs in Israel was rising, I feared that the handwriting was on the wall. Even more regrettably, I have a similar feeling in the present. Nonetheless, changes have occurred in the past four years. I am referring to the establishment of the State Investigative Commission on the October 2000 Events, which became known by the name of its chairman, Justice Theodor Or. The very establishment of this commission...

Bioethics and Law Forum*: Twin Autonomy

Bioethics and Law Forum*: Twin Autonomy