Narcissism Of Small Differences Research Articles

Comparative Education: status controversy and dynamics of scientific development

The article addresses the problem of identity and status of comparative education in contemporary science, as well as its developmental dynamics and scientific potential. In its first part, the author reconstructs the debate on the 'crisis' of comparative education and also the various avenues of its critique, especially, but not exclusively, in the context of its relationship with other (sub)disciplines. Part two focuses on the developmental dynamics of comparative education, against the background of the discussion regarding the various criteria and aspects of estimating the state of (sub)disciplines. Thus, the theoretical and methodological openness of comparative education and its responsiveness to social change will be presented. Furthermore, comparative education is placed in the context of the debate between essentialism and scientific constructivism, the problem of interdisciplinarity and research integration, the density paradox or the narcissism of small differences, as well as the challenge of postmodernism. The final section of the text presents the idea of a comparative educator as a traveller and its potential to transcend one's own epistemological script.

Extra-Poliical Analysis of Interethnic Relations

The article discusses the main psychological mechanisms that contribute to the formation of interethnic conflicts. The author describes the following psychological phenomena: historical mental trauma inflicted by a hostile group; narcissism of small differences; identification with the aggressor; transmission of traumatic experiences to the next generations; division of all ideas and all people into ‘we’ and ‘they’; importance of culture and language in the formation and personality’s social functioning. The conclusion substantiates an original hypothesis about the intensification of interethnic conflicts around the world in the twenty-first century.

Transactional Analysis and Psychoanalysis: Overcoming the Narcissism of Small Differences in the Shadow of Eric Berne

This article addresses how narcissistic identification with specific theoretical models interferes with further learning, development, and maturation within both individual and group contexts. Drawing on Freud’s initial reflections on the functions and consequences of narcissistic identifications and defenses within the life of groups, the author describes the impact of the narcissistically motivated inflation of differences in the history and evolution of transactional analysis. While acknowledging Eric Berne’s efforts to create an open and inclusive model of psychotherapy, the transgenerational consequences of his ambivalent and conflicted relationship with psychoanalysis are portrayed. The narcissistic encapsulation of transactional analysis as a unique methodology, subsequent to Berne’s death, is challenged.

Martin Parr’s Signs of the Times, A Portrait of the Nation’s Tastes: antidote pictures to consumerism?

This study of Martin Parr’s book Signs of the Times: A Portrait of the Nation’s Tastes (1992) traces the roots of the British photographer’s interest in consumption practices and of the new form of social documentary photography that has become his trademark. We show that Parr’s take on the 1990s craze for home decoration pinpoints deep shifts in British society at the end of the Thatcher era, towards more individualism and materialism. The combination of images and quotes from his subjects gives an insight into the consumers’ psyche, revealing forms of commodity fetishism, narcissism of small differences, and an obsession with upward social mobility. Beyond seemingly futile decoration issues, the photos address personal identification through objects and the power relations that it involves. Yet, the photographer’s distant gaze and humorous use of motifs help avoid pathos and provide viewers with an “antidote to propaganda” in Parr’s own words, namely, to the dominant consumerist ideology, although this has meant a controversial departure from the traditional codes of social documentary.

Souffrance au travail et violence relationnelle. Essai sur le mal institué

Among the factors of work suffering, we can recognise the structural role that plays the organisation of work; it has been pin pointed and underlined by Christophe Dejours and his colleagues in the last decades of the xxth century. However, it seems interesting to also interrogate the role of relational violence. To what extent does it take place in the genesis of this health problem and to the extent that it has become a preoccupation for clinicians? To answer this question, the author examines three processes regulating interpersonal links. He endeavours to determine if they can shed a light on the comprehension of mechanisms of violence within the specific work relationships framework. First will be addressed the group level phenomena of the “emissary victim”. According to René Girard, this process’ function is to enable the group to bind through the common participation of eliminating one of its members. Hence the members create unanimity with a minus one. For Sigmund Freud, the concepts of “narcissism of small differences” help understand how you can be led to hate your immediate neighbour, or a peer that is not totally similar to you; if he is attacked on his little differences, it is because they are perceived as a menace to the aggressor's narcissisms. Lastly, according to Emmanuel Diet, it is a situation of crisis in an institution or company that will induce a subject in crisis; this person, because of certain traits of his personality's pathological predispositions, will find himself in a position of “thanatophore”, as a beholder of death, embodying destructivity. A clinical illustration based on a psychotherapist/psychologist's private practice will punctuate the conceptual path accompanied by the three authors previously mentioned. We shall demonstrate that their propositions help shed light on the comprehension of situations brought by patients consulting due to sufferings experienced at work.

Studije kulture i antropologija: sudar titana ili narcizam malih razlika?

Studije kulture i antropologija: sudar titana ili narcizam malih razlika?

The Real Future of the Media

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man: Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944).

Rethinking the Humanities

Rethinking the Humanities Len Findlay (bio) In 1990 I secured a commitment from the discretionary fund of the then Dean of Graduate Studies and Associate Vice-President Research at the University of Saskatchewan, Jack Manns. There were three key features of this arrangement for which I gained approval. The Humanities Research Unit I proposed to establish would not be located in a single college but would develop collaborative relations with several. It would report to the Office of the Vice-President Research. And it would be funded from the university's base budget. This arrangement allowed for a strategy of serving the traditional humanities community on campus while creating new collaborative communities on and off campus. Here was a way to advance the disciplinary and transdisciplinary agenda which Canadian universities were beginning to favour and to do so with some intellectual freedom and secure (if modest) resources. This was not the first attempt to "rethink" the humanities, nor has it been easy to keep this project going through various waves of institutional planning, prioritizing, branding, positioning, and forced migration from our long-term space in order to accommodate a Confucius Institute, but the Humanities Research Unit survives and prospers as a source of critique, debate, education, and learning on display and in progress, thanks to the co-direction provided by first Marie [End Page 1] Battiste (Aboriginal Education) and Lynne Bell (Art and Art History) and by a range of supportive colleagues, students, and staff. From the outset, unit programming emphasized three key themes: threats and impediments, academic value, and decolonizing education. As these themes (and their variations here) attest, humanities work is always pursued on challenging terrain but with intellectual resources predominantly but not exclusively text-based and well fitted to engaging with and illuminating questions of pressing importance for scholars, students, institutions, and citizens. Over the years, the unit has approached each of the events it has solely or co-operatively sponsored as one more moment in a continuous process of remaking and reviewing the case for the humanities in contemporary Canada. And at the heart of this endeavour remains my home discipline of English Studies. As a disciplinary formation, English uses its compositional or training component and the global status of English as "the" language of science and business to dominate French, Indigenous, and immigrant-heritage languages on campuses across the country where the profitable option is almost always the easiest sell. English still has numbers—of students and faculty—to its advantage relative to its sister disciplines, making for a positive budgetary presence and a sizeable political presence in areas of collegial governance. However, English as the humanities' champion is also the instrumentalists' greatest prize, the place into which almost all the humanities can be caused to retreat and gradually forego allegiance to their dark materials. A single omnibus department called Composition and Cultural Studies does not seem much of a stretch once omnibus budgeting arrives from Ottawa at a campus near you, if it is not there already. English represents hope and enhanced endangerment that comes with being one of the last dominoes standing in the current remaking of Canadian postsecondary institutions. How, then, does English live up to its role as a champion of the humanities in hard times, rather than serving as a conduit for further cynical compaction and immiseration of intellectual work? One answer to this question must surely be new forms of solidarity beyond the "narcissism of small differences" (Freud 199; see also Kolstø) and resource wars. And it is such a form of non-homogenizing, performative solidarity that this special issue seeks to model. [End Page 2] Caveat auctor! In 1963 in France, in the middle of the theory ferment that has been read both as liberating and as endangering literary studies via the activities of Foucault, Derrida, Cixous, Irigaray, et al., there occurred the Humanist Controversy (La Querelle de Humanisme) whose central figure was Louis Althusser. This controversy, like the current special issue of ESC, derived from someone bringing people together to address a broad issue with particular political and academic aims. When an invitation was extended by editor Erich Fromm to Althusser to contribute to a collection on...

The Ethics of Memory Blunting and the Narcissism of Small Differences

At least since 2003, when the US President’s Council on Bioethics published Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, there has been heated debate about the ethics of using pharmacology to reduce the intensity of emotions associated with painful memories. That debate has sometimes been conducted in language that obfuscates as much as it illuminates. I argue that the two sides of the debate actually agree that, in general, it is good to reduce the emotional intensity of memories associated with traumatic events, when (as in the case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) the intensity of those memories is disproportionate to the precipitating traumatic event. Both sides also agree that, in general—not as an ironclad rule—it is bad to reduce the emotional intensity of memories associated with difficult but normal human problems of living, when the intensity of the emotions is proportionate to those problems. Between those two areas of agreement, there is a zone of ambiguity, in which reasonable people, who proceed from different but equally ethical frameworks, may indeed reach different conclusions about the same set of facts. But I will argue that even in the zone of ambiguity, there is more agreement than the language favored by the different frameworks sometimes suggests. Ultimately, I suggest that if we see the extent to which the substantive differences between the two frameworks are smaller than their articulators’ language sometimes suggests, we can engage in a more productive conversation about whether a particular intervention will facilitate or diminish human flourishing.

Response and responsibility (before and after the ‘facts’). Postcolonial thoughts on ethical writing

Let me begin by expressing my heartfelt thanks to Sarah Croucher, Audrey Horning, Tim Insoll and Peter van Dommelen for their thoughtful comments. It is not uncommon for academic critique to be seduced by the facility ofcriticism, to draw its impulse from what, with Freud, we might call the ‘narcissism of small differences’, and proceed with the obstinacy of the hatchet headed for the jugular . . . More artful, and far more difficult, is a form of engagement that gives more than it takes, that disputes but in the spirit of generous exchange. I feel that the respondents have accomplished precisely that. They have crafted a space of ‘hospitable’ discussion (cf. Derrida 2000), which rests on a double movement of ‘interruption’ (Westmoreland 2008): of their plane of thoughts, by bringing my article within the ambit of their conversations; and of my ideas, by making them a little less self-evident, a little less ‘at home’. This act of ‘making strange’ – when one's viewpoints acquire a different face as they are presented anew through the minds of others – is the cloth of which constructive dialogue is made.

The narcissism of small differences

The narcissism of small differences

The Narcissism of Small Differences: Scotland and Westminster

Apart from issues of representation, the new Scottish Parliament resembles Westminster more than its founders had hoped. It was influenced by the same reform agenda that has animated debates on reform of the Commons. The most significant changes from the Westminster model are evident in the voting system, though less than anticipated. Westminster continued to reform itself, albeit in limited ways, after 1997 while Holyrood has rarely addressed some of the same issues. Significant changes appear more likely at the outset of an institution's establishment than after it has come into being when practices, styles and interests are established and reform relies on either an exogenous shock or slow, incremental change

Bring Furrit the Tartan-Necks! Nationalist Intellectuals and Scottish Popular Culture

... yes, we welcome the diversity and the legitimacy which nationality brings, but we should also recognise the down side - not just the wars, the massacres, the intolerance, but the every-day nastiness of much nationalism, its petty-mindedness, its meanspiritedness, the endless selfserving arguments, the vast culture of moaning, whingeing, kvetching, self-pity, special pleading, that narcissism of small differences' that Freud rightly denounced. (Halliday 2000, pp. 158-59). Advancing a position unpopular in contemporary Scotland, the above passage is a volcanic eruption of the author's feelings about nationalism in an otherwise sober essay (based on his Ernest Gellner Memorial Lecture) in which he probes the implicitly and explicitly normative claims of nationalism on a number of fronts: national self-determination, the national in relation to the supranational, nationalism's moral agenda, and its uses of history. In all these areas Halliday poses substantial questions: whether national selfdetermination is always worth the cost in terms of social upheaval (Kosovo is his most recent example); whether it always delivers more humane state formations (Chechnya being a case in point); whether the national, as a given, should invariably trump the supranational (the routine flouting of the United Nations' charter and aims by national interests, nuclear proliferation argued on

Anti-Americanism in Canada, Before and After Iraq

When Americans think about anti-Americanism, they are likely to think of angry demonstrations in Pakistan, stuffy French intellectuals, or maybe a surly cab driver they once ran into in Mexico. Most are not likely to think of Canada, at least not right away. In fact, Americans who haven't had a lot of direct experience with Canadians might be mystified by idea that there could be anti-Americanism in Canada, given that Canada seems to have so much in common with United States, and Canadians are generally thought to be friendly and fair-minded. But anti-Americanism has a long and colorful history in Canada, and--contrary to expectations of those who argued that it had been defeated and exorcised in debate over Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement--anti-Americanism in Canada is apparently alive and well today, though in a different, somewhat attenuated form. In this essay, I will briefly review historical evolution of anti-Americanism in Canada, and then offer some reflections on its nature and implications today. Anti-Americanism is not same thing as disagreement with American values or policies. A person can emphatically reject something that United States says or docs, and even harbor profound resentment toward people who made those choices, without necessarily having anti-American views. Anti-Americanism is an attitude toward United States and its people which is profoundly mistrustful--a prejudice that colors way a person interprets Americans' choices, and consistently attributes them to negative values and purposes. (2) As comparative studies have shown, specific content of anti-Americanism that is, themes and arguments with which it is socially constructed--can vary widely from one society to another, and evolve over time. Canadians' experiences with anti-Americanism are just about as diverse as Canada itself, but they can be readily grouped into two main collective experiences: Anglophone and Francophone. (3) Each has its own enduring, primary impulse, but each has evolved and changed over time, in terms both of way it sees United States and way it manifests itself in political discourse and action. Ironically, given origins of Canada and United States as twins separated at birth, their essential and enduring similarities, and their long history of peace and cooperation, one might argue that Anglophone Canadian experience has been as close as one can get to anti-Americanism in its pure' form. It is, in other words, probably as close as we get to an anti-Americanism which persists even flourishes--without being sustained by profound political or cultural differences, anticipation of violence or direct coercion, or even deep-seated grievances. The (Anglophone) Canadian, as historian Frank Underbill famously said, is the first anti-American, model anti-American, archetypal anti-American, ideal anti-American as he exists in mind of God. (4) Despite or rather because of--the essential similarities between two societies, defining element of anti-Americanism in Anglophone Canada is differentiation. It is in that sense consistent with a widely recognized tendency for societies to be preoccupied with demonstrating, to themselves and to others, that they are separate and different from a larger, very-similar neighbor, as in New Zealand (vis-a-vis Australia), Austria (vis-a-vis Germain), and most of Central America (vis-a-vis Mexico). The search for bases of differentiation, and natural impulse to harness them in support of group cohesion and a positive collective self-image, fosters what Freud called 'narcissism of small differences. (5) These impulses may be especially powerful in Canada, because of relatively shallow and profoundly contested nature of country's sense of national identity: Canadians are forever casting about for markers for collective identification, but there are few at hand, apart from not being Americans. …

Ambition, vocation, and sociology

Offering advice to graduate students in sociology about their career prospects is an uncertain venture. I come to the question of how to give advice with the status of an outsider. I have taught nearly my entire career in undergraduate settings, the most recent one for the past 25 years. Most of my advice has been to students considering applying to graduate school in sociology. From this vantage, I send them off and then only see them again when their cohort reaches the stage of applying for jobs at colleges such as my own. The "missing" period of my observations about their socialization requires that I speculate least about it. But I can say with what I think is some certainty, that the probation period of assistant professor is, in many ways, the more obvious moment of truth for many young sociologists than what they choose to do in graduate school. My impression is that between the graduate career and the time before tenure, many sociolo gists find their groove; most stay in it, some abandon it, and a few make it out of their professional trenches into the larger battles of ideas in a world where the usual qualities of human nature are in full force. I start with the basic proposition that well-crafted research, whether qualitative or quantitative, requires translation for audiences beyond those directly familiar with spe cific theories and methodologies. Having edited three journals during the past 15 years and having worked with hundreds of contributors over that same time, I can confidently report that the truest measure of what is important in social science is always a mix of professional accomplishment and broader public recognition and acknowledgment. But let me be as candid as I can about this mix: for some of us achievement within a profes sion with little notice beyond it is necessary and also sufficient; for others personal ambition demands greater recognition than a profession alone can provide. The narcis sism of small differences that often painfully defines the relations among colleagues in the various small ponds in which they find themselves has to be balanced against the much larger pond of the marketplace, where vanity is rarely absent in the sound-byte world of public notice and attention. Academics with large egos are similar to those thousands of kids on basketball courts across the country, all of whom dream of drib bling their way to the NBA. It would appear that an excess of academic vanity could be Jonathan B. Imber is Class of 1949 Professor in Ethics and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College where he has taught for 25 years. He has been Editor-in-Chief of Society since 1998 and is author most recently of the forthcoming Trusting Doctors: The Decline of Moral Authority in American Medicine as well as Close Calls: Essays on Vocation.

Antisemitism in Sweden and Finland A documentation and a psychoanalytic discussion

Political developments in Sweden during the last decade, including a period of increased activities of the extreme right, coincide with a resurgence of previously suppressed antisemitic sentiments in the media and among politicians of different affiliations. Classical, often traditional Christian, antisemitic formulations are published in both Sweden and Finland in connection with media reports of the conflict between Israel and its neighbors. An increase of signs of anti-Jewish hatred among young Muslim immigrants in Sweden is described, as is the Rami-Bergman affair in the 1980s at Uppsala University in which a Professor of Theology testified under oath that there is a compelling Biblical commandment for Jews to kill strangers. Recent antisemitic statements made by high-ranking Finnish dignitaries of government, parliament and church against the background of 20'h century Finnish history are discussed and a government decision to deprive Israel of Finnish-made gasmasks during the American war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq is noted. We contend that traditional antisemitic thought patterns are visible in the Nordic countries and that they can be understood in terms of envy, the narcissism of small differences, the return of the repressed, and as representing an unconscious resentment against truthfulness.

Before Postnationalism: Supernationalism, Modernisme , and Catalonia

Before Postnationalism: Supernationalism, Modernisme, and Catalonia Brad Epps is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He has published over fifty articles on modern literature, film, art, and architecture from Spain, Latin America, Catalonia , and France and is the author of Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo (Oxford UP). He is currently preparing two books: Daring to Write, on gay and lesbian issues in Latin America, Spain, and Latino cultures in the United States, and Barcelona and Beyond, on modern Catalan culture. He is also co-editing two volumes, one with Luis Fernández Cifuentes, Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity, and another with Keja Valens, Passing Lines: Immigration and (Homo)sexuality. To wish class or nation away, to seek to live sheer irreducible difference now in the manner of some contemporary poststrucuralist theory, is to play straight into the hands of the oppressor. —Terry Eagleton Introduction: An Alluring Proposition Postnationalism may well be a lure, and a late capitalist one at that. It serves, within an increasingly anxious intellectual market, as a sign that sells. And what it sells, ever so symbolically, is nothing less than the promise of a new world, free from the narcissism of small differences and the fanaticism of big identities, beyond the pettiness of borders and the grandeur of patriotic projects. Postnationalism shimmers seductively as a way out of so many nagging problems, so much sacrifice and violence, so much divisive love and ironclad hatred. Ample as its bounds may be, it is arguably related less to internationalism, in the Marxian sense, than to multinationalism, where globalization is of capital importance indeed. Even if the concept is taken less dramatically as indicating a crisis in strong understandings of national identity, even if it is taken as more descriptive than prescriptive, it nonetheless suggests a world order in which nationalism is out of sync with new material technologies, modes of information, and markets. However superannuated it may seem to some, nationalism, in all its contenArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 134 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies tious guises, remains rigorously current for many more. As Immanuel Wallerstein asserts, "[tjhere is no question that, at the present time, nationalism in general [...] is a remarkably strong world cultural force," stronger now, he continues, "than any other mode of social expression or collective mentality," with the possible exception of religion, to which it is so often bound (314). Even Eric Hobsbawm, who writes of the decline of nationalism as an historical force, notes that "there is no foreseeable limit to the further advance of national separatism" (163). There is also, of course, no foreseeable limit to national consolidation and expansion, most spectacularly that of the United States of America in its various wars against terrorism . And yet, obviously, there is some question as to the strength, sweep, and future of nationalism, a question posed by the very existence of something called "postnationalism." As term and concept, "postinternationalism" also exists, as well as "postcapitalism," and perhaps, though I have yet to see it, "postmultinationalism ." Whatever the case, the proliferation of the "post" is as dizzying as it is undeniable . Postinternationalism, as formulated by James Rosenau and his followers, takes as its motivating force the insufficiency of the sovereign state of Westphalian Europe to account for the dynamics of contemporary global politics. Postnationalism appears to be similarly motivated, though the accent tends to fall on the dangers of nationalism (its violence, racism, sexism, and so on) rather than on the limitations of the established analytical protocols of international relations theorists. The ethicopolitical , even moral, tenor of postnationalism is such that the contrast with nationalism is not only charged but also overstated. Far from being mutually exclusive , nationalism and postnationalism are in many respects complementary—one highly successful Western construction entailing another, so far less successful and more anxiously Western construction. The repercussions of such constructions for what is not the West, or not quite the West, are serious, but so too are the repercussions for the West itself—its frayed yet persistent European core. For nationalism is by no means inoperative in contemporary Europe; nor, despite...

Two Months in the Confederate States An Englishman's Travels Through the South (review)

(Do they in the United States either?) Turn it around: are Americans working in British history really just obliquely learning about the United States? If not, how does that case differ from European Americanists (not)studying America? Certainly the study ofAmerican cultural influence upon Europe is important, ifit can avoid being mesmerized by popular culture and doesn't deteriorate into humorless griping about American cultural hegemony. But I don't believe for a second that that's all Europeans can do, or should be doing, when diey engage with American culture. Overall, I can't help concluding diat part of the problem with Not Like Us is that the America-Europe opposition, for so long a staple in the American cultural consciousness and in American studies, is no longer what worries us or them most. Or at least Pells fails to convince me that it does. Since the 1960s, the question about who or what America is has demanded diat Americans look within— to the cultural divisions within the society rather than to how American culture relates to its parent culture in Europe. Race and ethnicity—not nationality—have become the central terms in the debate, and for many Americans European culture no longer is the parent culture. A global perspective suggests that the central cultural issue is really "the West" versus "the Rest." The differences between American and European cultures are not all that great now, merely interesting rather than existential, a prime example of what Freud referred to (in another context) as "the narcissism of small differences." Two Months in the Confederate States An Englishman's Travels Through the South By W C. Corsan, edited by Benjamin H. Trask Louisiana State University Press, 1996 216 pp. Cloth, $26.95 Reviewed by Susan H. Irons, a doctoral candidate at the Univeristy of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her dissertation is in the area of southern literary historiography. In conclusion, Ihave only to express a hope that theprecedingpages, exhibiting, asIhave wishedthem to do, withoutprejudice, the true state ofaffairs in the Confederate States, may cause reflecting men to ask themselves, whether it is not time that an attemptso hopeless as that ofsubjugating the South should be abandoned? Reviews 83 Benjamin H. Trask has recovered a lively voice from the past, a voice heavy with the accents of time and place. Trask's recent republication of the neglected 1863 Two Months in the Confederate States by "an English Merchant" brings to light an interesting , informative, and enjoyably readable account ofa British citizen's southern travels from October to December of 1 862. The work is valuable both as a source of firsthand information about the social and economic conditions of a defining period in die South's history and as a text diat engages late-twentiethcentury readers in the retrospective exercise of measuring the narrator's impressions and predictions against the evolution of historical events. Trask does an admirable job ofdispensing his responsibilities as editor. He has increased the value of die work tenfold through his background research and extensive footnoting of the material. The editorial decision to divide die original unbroken text into twelve chapters as well as into paragraphs increases the work's readability witiiout violating the narrator's voice. Trask respects the integrity of the work while making it more inviting to a wider range of readers. High on Trask's agenda is ascertaining the identity behind the vocational pseudonym , "an English Merchant," of the original edition. He credits the narrative to William Carson Corsan, a hardware merchant and manufacturer from Sheffield , England, whom others have also assumed, but not proven, to be the author of the travel account. Through his searching of records on both sides of die Atlantic , Trask makes a convincing argument that Corsan came to the South to check on his company's American representatives behind die northern blockade, to assess the economic health of the Confederacy, and to investigate trade possibilities within the area. When Corsan returned home, he wrote his account of the adventure, which Trask apdy sums up as "die business trip ofa lifetime." This adventurous businessman clearly worked within the traditions of nineteenth -century travel writing, organizing his account by his geographic...

Discussion: The Narcissism of Small Differences — and Some Big Ones

Discussion: The Narcissism of Small Differences — and Some Big Ones