Italics Mine Research Articles

How Crito Might Have Rejoined

Plato’s overarching and seemingly unabashedly explicit purpose of his entire Socrates-featured — not to say -dominated — dialogue-form corpus is to put forth Socrates’ side of any argument in a singularly positive light. While, granted, this asymmetry is at times disrupted by the rather strong appearances of such then-leading erudite and social lights as Parmenides, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon, Plato inclines toward portraying Socrates’ interlocutors as virtually reflexively assenting to what the latter maintains, or proposing toothless, undeveloped, in a word, pro forma differing opinions. Conversely, Socrates is (literally) unfailingly rendered as more composed and amiable than, and as intellectually superior to, everyone else; it is he who normally determines the direction of, leads, and wins nearly every debate; and he either adroitly converts his counterparts to his side or even reduces them to silence. Not surprisingly, therefore, after perusing any of Plato’s dialogues wherein the participants arrive at no clear understanding of the subject under discussion, the reader is left with the distinct sense that this is, fundamentally, Socrates’ personal, but nevertheless sublime, failure. As Plato quotes Socrates intimating about as much in the concluding paragraphs of the Charmides: “I have been utterly defeated, and have failed to discover what that is to which the lawgiver gave this name of temperance or wisdom” (175b) (italics mine).

A History of Contemporary Praise and Worship: Understanding the Ideas That Reshaped the Protestant Church by Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong

Reviewed by: A History of Contemporary Praise and Worship: Understanding the Ideas That Reshaped the Protestant Church by Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong Paul Westermeyer A History of Contemporary Praise and Worship: Understanding the Ideas That Reshaped the Protestant Church. By Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2021. 420 pp. Ruth is professor of Christian worship at Duke University, and Hong is Professor of Sacred Music at Emmanuel College of Victoria University. They wrote Lovin' on Jesus: A Concise History of Contemporary Worship (Nashville: Abingdon, 2017) and call the title of this book a "neologism" (xvi) to encompass two theologies which flowed together. "Praise & Worship" emphasized "praise as the pathway to God's presence," and "Contemporary Worship" was a "strategic approach" to evangelism. The authors see this book work as a comprehensive, detailed, sympathetic, descriptive, and scriptural history, not theological in the sense of what God was or was not doing, [End Page 110] and told from a North American standpoint (xiv–xv). They see its distinction from other studies in its focus on how "these Christians wrestled with the foundational text of their religion, the Bible" (307) which allows them "to see this history as part of a long-standing approach in Protestantism called the Free Church tradition" (308). This is a carefully researched and detailed study. Part 1 gives the history of praise and worship, part 2 the history of contemporary worship, and part 3 the confluence of the two. Subheads proceed historically: 1, headwater, 1946–65; deepening the channel, 1965–85; increasing currents, 1965–85; and a swollen river, 1985–95; 2, subterranean stirrings, pre-1965; first wave of contemporary worship, 1965–85; and second wave, 1985–mid-1990s; 3, the new liturgical normal, late 1990s. An appendix summarizes the two histories in parallel columns of small print (311–313). Lutherans will see works righteousness in the assertion that praise leads to worship and brings us into God's presence (84), that God "inhabits"—"is enthroned"—on our praise and is "liberated to act mightily" (91). In this view, our work gets God to do something. Lutherans will note further that when Protestants adopted bands without the praise and worship theology, another kind of works righteousness emerged with music becoming a tool to sell Christianity. We, not God, sustain the church, by selling it with music that will attract customers (176). Worship is marketing (224). Lutherans and others may see "new measures" here as the German Reformed theologian John Williamson Nevin saw their nineteenth century roots (see 172 and 206)—a "Montanist Phrygian dance" (The Anxious Bench [1844], 27–9). The book discusses trends from Youth for Christ, church growth movements, and business models with numerical quotas as well as inculturation efforts with popular musical styles intended to close perceived generational and other gaps between the church and our society's culture. As might characterize a Free Church movement, word and sacraments are not discussed except to indicate that "a musical worship leader" in this tradition is "not a minister of the Word of God or of the sacraments, i.e. a pastor." A paradox nonetheless emerges that church musicians are "typologically" [End Page 111] associated "with the priestly [italics mine] musicians of David's tabernacle" (133). Another paradox, though not treated as a paradox, is that this form of attracting people led to worship wars (284–5) and exacerbated divisions. Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Protestants who view themselves as evangelical catholics will object to the liturgical iconoclasm present in these movements. Inculturation strongly linked to secular musical forms and instruments troubles Orthodox and others with the early church's concerns about associations of idolatry and immorality. Various people, among them youth and seekers, say that this music is "manipulative, insulting, and makes me sick to my stomach," notwithstanding the large crowds it drew. This book will evoke strongly different reactions from readers. It will help both groups—those who agree and those who disagree—to understand the movements it describes and their influences. The authors have attempted to explain them sympathetically and accurately without committing to them. The book's detail takes sustained effort, but is worth reading. Paul Westermeyer...

Sider Jost, Jacob. Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century: Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano

Sider Jost, Jacob. <i>Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century: Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano</i>

TRANSGRESSING GENDER AND SEXUAL IDENTITY: RE-READING ISMAT CHUGHTAI’S THE QUILT (LIHAAF)

The study addresses that traditional notion of gender and sexual identity limits our understanding of the two categories as fixed and thus we are socio-culturally taught that truth or realty is absolute. Keeping this in mind, a critical study of Ismat Chughtai’s globally acclaimed short story entitled The Quilt (Lihaaf) informs us that the writer in a very complex way oscillates between two intertwined narrative threads among others: one is the participation of some male and female characters (under the dictates of patriarchal value system) in Muslim community in disciplining or gendering the body of women while the other thread overlapped in the narrative is the silent effort of Begum Jan ( central female character) to move byond her gendered space with a view to becoming a new woman in terms of gender and sexual orientation. Her husband as the story unfolds is also a man of strange hobby (italics mine) despite having a strong commitment towards his religion. He is more interested in spending time with his disciples than that of enjoying his conjugal life. People around him begin to but nobody has the courage to speak anything against the mysterious way of leading his married life. The study chooses Chughtai’s The Quilt (Lihaaf) as a textual site to examine how Begum boldly (though not loudly) foils the oppressive forces institutionalized by patriarchy. In doing so, she not only redefines the position of Muslim women of her time but also brings to the fore another possibility of their gender and sexual identity that transgresses beyond fixed categories: male/ female; masculine/feminine. The short story, if read in this direction may renew the young minds as the story telling tradition in India since time immemorial has been the carrier of moral and socio-cultural values.

To “Throw Off the Cloak of Representation”

To “Throw Off the Cloak of Representation”

Dress, Adornment, and the Body in the Hebrew Bible by Laura Quick (review)

Reviewed by: Dress, Adornment, and the Body in the Hebrew Bible by Laura Quick Laura Carlson Hasler Laura Quick. Dress, Adornment, and the Body in the Hebrew Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 185 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000131 Laura Quick's Dress, Adornment, and the Body in the Hebrew Bible is a compelling study of how clothing reflects and activates identity in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East. In Quick's analysis, adornments are agential symbols of an individual's social role and status. This monograph investigates [End Page 433] the means by which bodies were coded in the ancient Levant, and invites us to rethink our interpretations of well-known biblical stories. The complex relations among personhood, clothing, and the body emerge in chapter 1 ("Dress and the Body"). Quick contends that the imagined porousness of bodies in antiquity meant that adornment could serve as an extracorporeal expression of personhood (27). As part of the "permeable body complex," clothing reveals and extends the boundaries of the self. As with each chapter, Quick's formulations have consequences for biblical interpretation. Here, Quick argues that clothing participates in the transfer of monarchical and marital status. Quick's formulation of clothing "encod[ing] personhood" raises questions related to the precise contours of "personhood" as well as to the limits of such coding (33). In her discussion of David and Saul's episodic showdown in 1 Samuel 24, Quick argues that David's "cutting the hem of Saul's cloak is a symbolic act with huge significance: Saul is understood to have physically been breached or damaged" (38). This raises the possibility that "to encode," for Quick, signals the erosion of the distinction between the "merely" symbolic and the physically real. The "heavy symbolism" of clothing, in other words, not only reveals or foretells status changes, it brings them about. Though Quick leaves the somatic effects that David incurs ambiguous—David's action of cutting has "damaged Saul in some way" (38; italics mine)—the implication is that clothing may afford a middle way between sign and activity. David has not quite dismantled Saul's grip on the kingship but he has also not quite not done that either. Later, Quick calls the donning of certain adornments "sign" or "speech" acts, raising the further question of how such performative symbols operate when mediated by written narrative (65, 174). In chapters 2 ("Dress and Ritual") and 3 ("Dress and Identity") clothing participates in adaptations of the body through the invocation of ritual. Drawing upon Akkadian literature, Quick clarifies perplexing moments in the Hebrew Bible (like the reference to Judah's wine-soaked garments in Genesis 49:11) in terms of the ritual acts they invoke and the bodily consequences—protection, absolution, cursing—they incur. Quick argues, moreover, that this connection between clothing and ritual illuminates women's agency in the realm of textile production for cultic practice, particularly in rites of protection, mourning, and interaction with the dead (72). The question of the efficaciousness of apparel resurfaces in the story of Tamar and Amnon (2 Samuel 13). Though Tamar's robes signal her "protected" status, that status is violently disregarded by Amnon. Tamar responds, Quick contends, through the heavily symbolic rending of these very garments. Yet this story also seems to shine a light on the complex relation among human agents and their effective symbols. 2 Samuel 13 invites us to ask: Who is willing—or able—to transgress bodies coded with protection and why? Why do some symbols "work" and others fail? Quick deploys the Ugaritic tale of Aqhat, and the boundary-defying adornment of Pughat in particular, to illustrate the central argument of chapter 3: that dress is a complex means of identity or role-adoption. The compound affordances of clothing also surface in the high priest's clothing, which is perceived as provocative, insofar as it aims to capture divine attention. Quick contends that this garb also obfuscates the priest's body, enabling his role to transfer to another, to represent the Israelites writ large, and to blur the priest's gender. She concludes [End Page 434] that this clothing renders the priest's body both whole and...

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco (review)

Reviewed by: The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poeticsby Lewis Turco Joy Landeira Lewis Turco. The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Fifth Edition. U of New Mexico P, 2020. 431p. For fifty years, poets, teachers and students have relied upon The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poeticsto provide definitions, explanations, and examples of formal structures of verse written in English from classical times through the Middle Ages to the present. Comparatists who write and study poetry in other languages will also enjoy the commonalities and shared origins from Italian, French, Spanish, Welsh, and Irish works. True to its subtitle, the handbook’s handy “form finder index” lists over three hundred traditional forms, based on meter, rhyme scheme, and stanza or poem lines (91). More than a glossary or reference book, this up-to-the minute fifth edition goes well beyond enumerating and defining poetic forms. Its detailed and often humorous clarifications and examples from centuries of poets, as well as a good dose from the author himself, inspire readers to investigate and immerse themselves in poetry. Poetry, Turco tells us, is “the artof language.” He identifies the levelsof language usage: typography (how words are distributed on the page); sound (rhyme, meter, phrasing); tropes (figures of speech that appeal to all sensory modes); and theme. To bring them to life, the [End Page 136]author delights in engaging his own art of language and narrating with clever double entendre and internal rhyme. For instance, to interpret Mawr’s twelfth-century Welsh “To a Girl” who has spurned a lover, Turco vividly draws a picture: “the suitor is ‘cut dead’—he is no morethan a shadow lying flat on the floor… Mawrdoes no morewith this image” (53—italics mine). Mawr may not do more, but through his spry and sly intervention, Turco gives us Mawr and more. Teachers and students will appreciate not only basic information about poetic components, but also the careful and entertaining evaluations of how and why they work. More than three hundred pages are dedicated to “traditional verse forms,” divided by genre into dramatic (tragedy, comedy, monologue, dialogue, soliloquy), lyric, and narrative poetry (ballad, romance), with alphabetized definitions and illustrations. Lyric receives the lion’s share of attention, detailing hundreds of variants, with added discussions of voicing since lyric poems (songs) are in subjective voice, while narrative uses objective, and dramatic verse employs dramatic voice—of course, all can allow combinations. The real treasure gleams through the examples, from Anonymous Welsh medieval versifiers, to Emily Dickenson, to Walt Whitman, to the author himself. In an oft-played trick, Lewis Turco particularly indulges Wesli Court with long citations of frequently ribald original poems that perfectly demonstrate the concepts. Who is this Wesli Court? Hint, hint: see “acrostic” (128). If I may offer my own Spanish bilingual acrostic, I would tell you this is a Wise Truco! Poets and soon-to-be poets will find a wealth of inspiration in these structures and samples, for they challenge us to play. Try writing a cross-rhymed, alliterated Irish séadna, an enjambed sestina, an aubade (alba) for morning, or an elegy for mourning, or cut up words and rearrange them randomly into “Dada” poems. Turco dedicates The Book of Forms“to my students and formalist friends past, present, and future.” Don’t just use it as a reference, read it from beginning to end, and you too will be a formalist friend. [End Page 137] Joy Landeira University of Wyoming Copyright © 2021 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association

Happenings and Story: A Response to Dan Shen's “Covert Progression”

Happenings and Story: A Response to Dan Shen's “Covert Progression”

Toni Morrison (1931-2019): Reaching toward the Ineffable

Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue? (Stockholm lecture, 1993, D 203, italics mine) Toni Morrison, c...

The Shape of Air: American Sign Language as Narrative Prosthesis in 21st Century North American Media

The Shape of Air: American Sign Language as Narrative Prosthesis in 21st Century North American Media

Comment on Vollon, Gimenez and Bonnet: ‘The psychotic transference in groups’

In his written work, Foulkes never gave a systematic account of psychosis, psychotic disturbances and psychotic transference(s). Instead we find scattered remarks and reflections on the subject of psychosis throughout his writings. However, it is noteworthy that his first psychoanalytic article (Foulkes, 1930) was dedicated to Observations on the significance of the name in a schizophrenic (Foulkes, 1990: 3–20). Moreover, in his first group analytic article (Foulkes and Lewis, 1944), he mentioned and encouraged the treatment of psychotic patients in mixed groups (Foulkes, 1984, case 8, 10, 11 and 12: 30–33) but cautioned that in a group ‘psychoses should not be in the majority’ and ‘groups with psychotics only were a different matter’ (Foulkes, 1984: 35). However, some his most consistent statements on psychosis are given in his late articles. For instance, the view that ‘undoubtedly, the person who later develops a psychosis, is also conditioned by his early group, and vice versa’ (Foulkes, 1990: 276). And the conviction that ‘psychotic mechanisms are operative in all of us, and that psychosis-like mechanisms and defences are produced very early’ (Foulkes, 1990: 276). However, he cautioned that ‘later psychotic illness’ should not be considered as ‘regressions to these early stages as one might say that neurosis or neurotic reactions are’ (Foulkes, 1990: 276; cf. Wälder, 1937). And although Foulkes acknowledged that ‘early development produces many of the phenomena that are stressed by Melanie Klein’ (Foulkes, 1990: 276; italics mine), he posited that they were ‘being brought about by the interaction of the whole family on these primitive levels’ (Foulkes, 1990: 276). ‘Complicated emotions’, he wrote, ‘can be felt even by the small child as actually represented and transmitted, however unconsciously, by the parents, brothers and sisters and so on’ (Foulkes, 1990: 276).

The Feedback Loop of Torture

The Feedback Loop of Torture Eva R. Hudecova (bio) THE SUBJECT OF TORTURE: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND BIOPOLITICS IN TELEVISION AND FILM by Hilary Neroni Columbia University Press, 2015 In her 2015 book, The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film, published by Columbia University Press, Hilary Neroni sets out to analyze the changes in the approach toward torture since 9/11, as well as the way in which these changes are represented in visual media depictions, such as documentaries and television melodramas. Throughout her book, Neroni identifies a kind of feedback loop: she highlights the importance of the study of depictions of terrorism and torture in popular culture, particularly because they are not simply “effects” or “reflections” of the changing US legislation or execution of torture, but, significantly, because these popular culture texts influence public opinion, which in turn influences legislation. Neroni gradually builds an antagonistic relationship between bio-power and psychoanalysis as she sets up the biopolitical concept of affect (horror, pleasure, and others) and the psychoanalytical treatment of pain/desire as incompatible dichotomies, and ultimately chooses the psychoanalytic approach as the “correct” one. She states: “My basic claim is that these two theoretical approaches [biopower and psychoanalysis] to the body are thoroughly opposed to each other. One cannot reconcile biopolitics with psychoanalysis or the machinelike body with the desiring subject. There is, I contend, no possible compromise position” (27). As I will show in this review, this insistence on the incompatibility of biopolitics with psychoanalysis (rather than a willingness to explore the much more fertile ground where these two [End Page 170] approaches intersect) makes many of Neroni’s arguments problematic. The question here is not that of any forced “compromise,” but rather of allowing for nuance. Using psychoanalysis in tandem with bio-power offers a way to interpret the ideology of biopolitics that sees through the pretense of biopower and understands the biopolitical administration of the body. Neroni’s critique of biopower takes it at face value. In other words, Neroni accepts that what biopower publicly presents as its goal is actually what biopower is doing. Analyzing the rhetoric of biopower with the tools of psychoanalysis allows us to figure out what may be repressed, or intentionally left unsaid by the system of biopower. The key point here is that biopower is effective in truth because it takes into account desire, but obscures it with scientific and biological rhetoric. Thus, psychoanalysis, as the approach for theorizing desire cannot be excluded in any productive critique of biopower. If biopower operated completely at face value (i.e., it would not deceive, omit, or silence), it would never survive. It is this lack of nuance regarding a more productive critique of biopower, as well as Neroni’s limited understanding of psychoanalysis (which I will examine below), that ultimately misses the mark on a potentially essential analysis of the transformative post-9/11 moment in history, when the human body (rather than the human psyche or mind) begins to be treated as a repository of truth. One of the problems with Neroni’s book is that the feedback loop she identifies, the connection between the government’s legislation and its implementation of torture and the public mood reflected in pieces of popular culture that in turn influences legislation, is not analyzed in depth. The following passage is one of very few throughout the book that addresses this connection: Representations of torture hold the key to the practice of torture and the belief system that underlies it because they interact with the fantasy that supports contemporary torture. It is not by accident that authorities seeking to justify torture turn to media representations in their defense of what seems like an indefensible practice. On the other hand, it is also through media representations that we can find a way out of the practice of torture. Representations both provide the justification for torture and reveal that torture is not our destiny today. . . . The decisive question is simply whether a film or television series generally perpetuates the belief that torture is effectual or ineffectual as a fact-finding procedure. (23–24, italics mine) [End Page 171] The above analysis imbues Neroni’s chosen...

Heir Conditioning: Dickens Planning Ahead

Heir Conditioning:Dickens Planning Ahead Robert Tracy (bio) The "purposive" man is always trying to secure a spurious delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time: […] by pushing always forward into the future, he strives to secure an immortality. John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." "Everything is some kind of plot, man." Thomas Pyncheon, Gravity's Rainbow. How to end The Pickwick Papers after serial publication in 20 monthly installments (Apr. 1836 – Nov. 1837) "was as little known to [Dickens] as to any of his readers" (Forster 88).1Not until Dombey and Son (1846–48) did he begin preparing careful working plans for each new novel. Before Dombey, how did Dickens end earlier novels without an exit strategy? How would he finally clarify mysterious events that readers had been speculating about for 19 months? His solution was to invent a will, imposing eccentric conditions an heir must meet to inherit, explaining retroactively a story's many mysteries in its final installments. Reporting disputed will cases at Doctors' Commons made him familiar with eccentric bequests: his "POSTSCRIPT in lieu of Preface" for Our Mutual Friend in 1865 tells readers that "[T]here are hundreds of Will Cases […] far more remarkable than that fancied in this book," in the archives at Doctors' [End Page 44] Commons. An eccentric will, invented after serial publication began, provides an exit strategy for Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens's imagined testators think like novelists. They write wills that control heirs as novelists control fictional characters. He prepared working plans for every novel after Dombey, but continued introducing wills to explain the mysteries he had invented. Dickens's 1837 preface to Pickwick explains what he learned about serial publication. A novel's "general design" should be "simple enough" to survive "this detached and desultory form of publication." Each number should be "complete in itself," but "form one tolerably harmonious whole." While Pickwick had not been "artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated," prefaces to later novels emphasize their woven design or pattern – terms Dickens preferred to plot (Little Dorrit, 1857 Preface). Forster met Dickens at Christmas 1836; he soon began urging him to decide how a novel would end before beginning publication. "I was responsible for [the] tragic ending" of The Old Curiosity Shop, he declares, and quotes Dickens's thanks for "your most valued suggestion, to keep my thoughts upon the ending of the tale." Dickens "had not thought of killing [Little Nell], when, about half-way through [publication], I asked him to consider whether it did not necessarily belong even to his own conception, after taking so mere a child through such a tragedy of sorrow, to lift her also out of the commonplace of ordinary happy endings, […] All that I meant he seized at once, and never turned aside from it again" (Forster 150–51). Oliver Twist (Bentley's Miscellany, Feb. 1837–Apr. 1839) begins with Oliver's birth in a workhouse, "badged and ticketed, […] a parish child […] humble half-starved drudge." His mother's death, immediately after giving birth, leaves him without identity and caste: "[I]t would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have fixed his station in society" (Oliver Twist I: ch. 1, Feb. 1837, italics mine). Dickens's reference to "station in society" hints that Oliver may not be a typical workhouse child. His language, moral instincts and Cruikshank's illustrations emphasize his difference from Fagin's boys: their "'looks convict 'em when they get into trouble, and I lose 'em all. With this boy, properly managed, […] I could do what I couldn't with twenty of them'" (Twist IX: ch. 19, Dec. 1837). Bentley's readers were well into Oliver Twist before Dickens decided that a will, imposing specific conditions on an heir, could be revealed to explain "More Mysteries Than One" in the final installment: Monks's identity and Fagin's attempts to make Oliver a criminal. Not until the twelfth installment (Bk. II, chap. 26, Mar. 1838), when "a mysterious character," enters, would readers encounter Monks and learn he has already been conspiring with Fagin to involve Oliver in a robbery. Writing to...

(Literary) Capital of the Russian Arctic: Murmansk in Russian Literature

In this article, I examine depictions of the city of Murmansk in Soviet and contemporary Russian literature: how different works describe Murmansk’s liminal location and role as a frontier city in the Russian Arctic. I approach this question by analyzing three themes central in the texts about Murmansk: 1) future visions of the city, 2) the role of the sea/ocean and the port in the city life, and 3) depictions of the geographical location and natural surroundings of the city. I ask how the image of the city may have changed during the last century and how different actors and places in the city space influence the urban experiences of the protagonists. The Arctic became “a key component of the modern mythology” in the Soviet Union in the 1930s (McCannon 1998: 81). This “Arctic myth”, examined extensively by John McCannon (1998, 2003), is an important context for my study. I am interested in the role of urbanization, focusing on the city of Murmansk, in the Arctic myth and in conquering the North in the 1930s. I also cover questions about the relationship between gender and urban space in this Arctic city text.My theoretical frameworks come from literary urban studies, geocriticism, ecocriticism and semiotics. I analyze Soviet texts in parallel with the contemporary material. The geocritic Bertrand Westphal proposes the geocentered approach to texts: “the geocritical study of literature is not organized around texts or authors but around geographic sites” (Prieto 2011: 20, italics mine). According to Westphal, analyzing a single text or a single author makes the study of a place lopsided, and geocritical study should emphasize the space more than an observer (Westphal 2011: 126, 131, italics mine). Applying Westphal’s geocentered approach to texts, I analyze depictions of Murmansk in multiple texts from different authors and decades. I prefer this kind of approach because exploring different eras’ texts about Murmansk, I want to give a comparative perspective to the history of Murmansk as a literary city.

The Uses of Hate: On Hate as a Political Category

The Uses of Hate: On Hate as a Political Category

'The old guessing tube': 200 years of the stethoscope.

There is a coming-of-age moment in the life of most medical students when they receive their first stethoscope. With the delivery of a deceptively simple medical instrument comes an implied message; that your primary objective from this point is in the care of sick people. Although many medical practitioners do not routinely use a stethoscope, all are trained to do so and the association between the stethoscope and the medical profession is such that, on checking this morning (1 July 2016), 39 of the first 40 images provided by Google searching ‘doctor’ are of people wearing stethoscopes. It might be more accurate to say that Rene Lannaec discovered ‘mediate auscultation’ in 1816 as the modern stethoscope took many years to evolve. Prior to Lannaec’s discovery, doctors performed direct auscultation by placing their ear directly onto the patient’s chest. The event that precipitated Lannaec’s invention is probably best described in his own words ( italics mine ). ‘In 1816, I was consulted by a young woman labouring under general symptoms of diseased heart and in whose case percussion and the application of the hand were of little avail on account of the great degree of fatness. The other method just mentioned ( direct auscultation ) being rendered inadmissible by the age and sex of the patient, I happened …

Western Arabo-Islamophobia: Where and When Will It End?

deep-seated Islamophobia undeniably harks back to many centuries of denigrating, and othering It has taken different forms at different times and in different contexts. From Spanish Reconquista to Crusades, and from colonial wars to post-coloniality, Islam has been archetypical enemy of West, demonised Other. This long-standing mental construct of Arabs and Islam in depth of Western psyche stems from manifold reasons that will be explained later. Hence, it unexpected that Islam has currently been made into what Kabbani (1986) once called, the religion West loves to hate . . . and dumping ground for all blame (italics mine). Every day, as Ali Bulac (12 June 2009) in Why Islam in conflict with West? notes, world confronts a new definition and another campaign for defamation: fanaticism, fundamentalism, political Islam, integrism, radicalism, Islamophobia, Islamofascism, reactionaryism, conservatism, extremism, Islamic terror, etc.Arabo-Islamophobia, as Said (1978), Kabbani (1986), and Chahuan (2005) point out, can be attributed to set of imperialistic designs that emanates from colonial past. The prejudices of today, aptly contends Chahuan, for instance, preserve and perpetuate falsehoods of past. European colonial aggression in Arab countries during XI X and XX centuries have been justified by series of arguments whose common denominator depreciation of Other, and negative view of Arabs today an extension of imperialist attitudes of past so far away.In contrast, Keegan, defence correspondent of Daily Telegraph (October 2001), Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington and their ilk, maintain that it of civilizations, (Esposito 1999: 230). But President Bush goes on so far as to claim that it a strugg le for Bush's address to nation (September 11, 2006) reveals perverse logic of Islamophobia today:The war against this enemy more than military conflict. It decisive ideological struggle of 21st century, and calling of our generation . . . This struggle has been called clash of civilizations. In truth, it struggle for civilization. We are fighting to maintain way of life enjoyed by free nations.Pope Benedict XVI also asserts this in his speech (September 12, 2006), as he equates Catholicism with reason and Islam with violence and lack of reason. Paraphrasing fourteenth century Byzantine emperor, he stated that when religion (like Islam) spread through violence it goes against reason, and also against nature, for not to act in accordance with reason contrary to God's nature.In Islamic Thinking in Limbo, published in Higher Education section of Australian on October 25, 2006, Riaz Hassan also alleges that Islam imprisons a sign ificant proportion of humanity into permanent servitude.., and that science weakest in lands of Islam. Hassan also assumes that consequential dangers of this weakness are devastating. Besides, he claims that Muslim countries are increasingly coming under intense pressure from religious fundamentalists to impose epistemologies comparable with their versions of Islamic doctrines that are generally hostile to critical rational thought. Furthermore, he alleges that most causes of Muslims' present predicament can also be attributed to prevailing culture and political practices, and that in his recent studies of contemporary Islamic consciousness in some Middle Eastern countries, he was struck by an all-pervasive sense of humiliation... This sense of humiliation, as he claims, is key underlying cause of Islamic militancy and terrorism.Hassan then concludes that A robust civil ethic prerequisite for developing society based on tyranny of strongly held convictions but on social order based on reason and compromise. …

The Doctrine of Prevenient Grace in George Herbert’s The Temple

The Doctrine of Prevenient Grace in George Herbert’s The Temple Kensei Nishikawa Prevenient grace is a notion that divine grace comes before any human initiative towards his own salvation. According to The Oxford Dictionary of English, it is “the grace of God which precedes repentance and conversion, predisposing the heart to seek, previously to any desire or motion on part of the recipient.”1 Scriptural supports for the doctrine can be found in such texts as Psalm 59:10 (“The God of my mercy shall prevent me; God shall let me see my desire upon my enemies”) and 2 Timothy 1:9 (“God hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus, before the world began”). Herbert must have been acquainted with that doctrine, judging from the following instances of his use of the word prevent: “Oh King of wounds! how shall I grieve for thee, / Who in all grief preventest me?” the speaker exclaims in “The Thanksgiving” (ll. 3-4), awed at the immensity of Christ’s Passion that removes from a believer all future pains as well as all possibilities to rival him in sacrifice; or addressing the streams of blood and water from the crucified Christ believed to counter sins in advance, the speaker in “H. Baptisme” (I) wonders how they “do prevent / And stop our sinnes from growing thick and wide” (ll. 7-8) There are also examples in which, without using the word “prevent” or its derivatives, Herbert refers to the prevenient quality of God’s salvific actions: the speaker in “Affliction” (II) ponders how the cross “took up in one / By way of imprest, all my future moan” (ll. 14-15, italics mine), comparing to an advance payment the salvific cost born by the Redeemer, while in “Obedience” he muses on how the Son’s sacrifice “was in earnest” (l. 28; italics mine), a non-rejectable offer of pledge that “we might not take or be withstood” (l. 30). More significantly than those local instances, however, Herbert often builds an entire poem based on the doctrine, in [End Page 66] which Christ is shown throughout to be a figure acting before or beyond the speaker’s expectation. Such embodiment of the doctrine of prevenient grace in the designs of some poems in The Temple is what I would like to explore in this essay. Before discussing Herbert’s poems in detail, it may be useful to consider two likely sources which theologically informed the poet. The first is the Book of Common Prayer, together with the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion incorporated in the Book. The BCP contains the following three Collects which refer to divine “prevention”: “By thy special grace preventing us, thou dost put in our minds good desires” (for Easter Day); “That thy grace may always prevent and follow us” (for the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity) and, most famously, “Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings, by thy most gracious favor (for at the end of communion).2 Similarly, pointing to the need of God’s favor before any meritorious volition on man’s part (as well as to the need of the subsequent divine help), Article X of the Thirty-Nine Articles declares: “We have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.”3 As a priest of the Established Church Herbert was likely to be at home with the above Collects and the Article they liturgically embodied. The second source is St. Augustine. That great Church Father, whose works we know the poet had in his library and bequeathed to one of his curates at Bemerton, was the first theologian who formulated the notion of prevenient grace.4 “[God’s mercy] comes before us … that we may be healed. … It comes before us that we may lead pious lives; it will follow so that we may always live with him, for without him we can do nothing,” wrote Augustine...

From Enjoyment to Refusal: Marcuse, Psychoanalysis, and the Condition of Affluent Capitalism

From Enjoyment to RefusalMarcuse, Psychoanalysis, and the Condition of Affluent Capitalism Zachary Tavlin In this essay, I will attempt to provide a way to read a direct heir of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, with a key member of the Marxian Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse has clearly opened a relation between Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis in Eros and Civilization. I will draw upon Freud’s theories of society and culture, as well as his system of subject-formation. Then, after considering Marcuse’s corrective on the basis of historical capitalism, as well as his critique of consumer capitalism in One-Dimensional Man, I will apply Lacan’s theory of the “two deaths” as a way of pressing the theoretical relevance of Marcuse’s critique for affluent capitalism, which relies upon the “injunction to enjoy.” I will also draw upon Žižek’s reading of Lacan as a way of articulating the political obstacles of (what Žižek calls) postmodern ideology, and the requisite theoretical deadlocks that need to be overcome before one can say anything of practical import. Finally, I will discuss the relevance of the categories of private and public space for the situation of postmodern ideology, as a way to initiate a “proposal without a program” that draws upon the “ethic of refusal” at the heart of the death drive. marcuse and freud Marcuse’s move is not to overtly contend with Freud’s claim that civilization requires a repression of the drives, but to historicize it, so that we can view late capitalism from the perspective of its work on Eros and Thanatos (libido and death drive) and still develop a theoretical model of a non-repressive economic and cultural system. Freud posits that obedience to the pleasure principle becomes untenable in a reality-space where pleasures themselves (or those things that satisfy our desires, which for Freud must be material and not merely hallucinatory or phantasmatic) are scarce. For Freud, reality is constructed in the first place by the psyche once the hallucinatory object (primordially, of the mother’s breast), continually recalled, inevitably fails to satisfy the quantity of excitation released by the circulating drive. Here, one [End Page 64] interprets the pleasure principle alongside the reality principle; the ego responds to reality in order to regulate sustainable pleasures and close the gap between the sexual aim and object. Civilization and society are upper-level reality constructions for the individual, fully analogous to this primordial reality construction. The renunciation of an unrestrained (but ultimately inadequate, since it intends towards repeatable as well as unrepeatable objects) Eros is paid for by a modest though consistent Eros, weakened and made indirect through the extension of desire toward social mediations like friendship (specifically friendships of utility, which in the influential Aristotelian account are degraded forms of friendship). For Freud, the result is being-with (a term I borrow from Heidegger to mark a difference: for the latter, Mit-sein is not produced but is rather an originary condition for Dasein). But it is, to a certain extent, the source of suffering: We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents 26, italics mine) The suffering of civilized society is born out of the social contract’s (implicit) stipulation that absolute gratification is to be denied to its members. This is a problem for Freud, but a structurally necessary one. And importantly, as a principle of civilization, the price (of repression and neurotic symptoms) is universal and not dependent upon the means and style of production. But what if this structural scarcity is not universal with regard to civilization as such, but indeed particular to the logic of capital? Certainly, as Marcuse points out, concentration of wealth in the hands of a few provides a specific type of scarcity. Marcuse goes further and affirms the question: “[Freud’s argument] applies to the brute fact of scarcity what actually...

Encyclopaedic Works on Islamic Political Thought and Movements in the Twenty-first Century

Books Reviewed: Gerhard Bowering, et. al., eds., The Princeton Encyclopediaof Islamic Political Thought (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UniversityPress, 2013); John L. Esposito and Emad El-Din Shahin, eds., The OxfordHandbook of Islam and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013);Emad El-Din Shahin, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics, 2 vols.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).During last two decades or so, many encyclopedias have been published onIslam and its history – classical to contemporary – with a modern approach,among them Richard Martin’s two-volume Encyclopedia of Islam and theMuslim World 1 and John L. Esposito’s Oxford Encyclopedia of the ModernIslamic World.2 Other encyclopedic works focus on specific eras, like JosefMeri’s Medieval Islamic Civilization.3 One more category is that of Islam andpolitics, political Islam, and/or the various facets, complexities, and intricaciesof Islamic movements. This essay focuses on three works that discuss thethemes and issues that fall in this last category.The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (EIPT)4 is awide-ranging one-volume publication, as well as the first encyclopedia andreference work on Islamic political thought. It includes articles ranging fromthe classical to the contemporary periods and incorporates the eras from theProphet’s time to the present. Written by prominent scholars and specialistsin the field, The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics (OHIP)5 is a singlevolumesourcebook that provides a comprehensive analysis of “whatwe knowand where we are in the study of political Islam,” thereby enabling scholars,students, and policymakers “to appreciate the interaction of Islam and politicsand the multiple and diverse roles of Islamic movements” both regionally andglobally (p. 2; italics mine). By analyzing Islam and politics through a detailedand profound study, the two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and ...