Newspaper Columns Research Articles

The Courtesan and the Gigolo: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Aaron Freundschuh

Freundschuh, Aaron. The Courtesan and the Gigolo: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017. ISBN 978-1-50360-082-9. Pp. 272. The “Pranzini affair” is one of the most remarkable crime stories of nineteenthcentury France. The triple murder could well have been an international myth as salacious and enduring as Jack the Ripper’s string of murders in fin-de-siècle London. Indeed, “the murders of London and Paris bear notable points of convergence, beginning with the outsize role of the mass press, which by the late 1880s had become a blinding industrial ream, saturating the streets and boulevards with paper, much of it printed with tales of hideous criminality”(3). The defendant Enrico Pranzini was a handsome migrant of Egyptian origin who fascinated the Parisian public with his good looks and ambiguous sexuality. The story was sensationalized in the press and the victims (an elegant woman,a child,and a domestic) were put under a microscope— particularly the victim who, at around forty years old, was said to be a high-class prostitute,known by the“faux-aristocratic pseudonym”of“Mme Montille”(2).Despite bearing all the elements of a tabloid news scandal and notwithstanding extensive coverage in the Parisian press,the Pranzini affair was soon forgotten.Aaron Freundschuh masterfully reconstructs the crime scene, investigation, trial, and press coverage of this remarkable scandal. Freundschuh transforms a historical true-crime story into a meditation on class, colonialism, and Third-Republic politics. Pranzini “became a metonym of the dark side of European empire and, as such, a repository for national anxieties and indigested animus”(9). Freundschuh locates the Pranzini affair as a key moment for the development of“the cultural imagination of the cosmopolitan colonial as criminal, like similar myths about Jews, freemasons, and socialists”; this cultural imagination “took hold in a political environment that colonial expansionism itself had, in some measure, destabilized”(197). One possible enduring effect of the Pranzini trial was the unification of the“forces of the New Right”through the conversion of the anti-Semite Édouard Drumont into an “ardent Boulangist” (148). After attempting a coup, General Boulanger, a minister and a darling of the far right, was reassigned to Clermont-Ferrand, enraging the Boulangists. This political scandal“shared newspaper column space for months” with the Pranzini affair, and the trial “became a platform for the public ridicule of deviant sexual identities” (148). Although the Boulangists were not universally anti-Semitic, the Pranzini affair was one of a series of polarizing events that consolidated anti-Semites, Boulangists, conservative Catholics, and monarchists into a coherent ideological block. The arguably seminal role of the Panzini affair in the consolidation of the fin-de-siècle New Right is only one example of Freundschuh’s deft contextualization of a minor incident in French history. This book is the rare contribution to French history that is gripping and readable enough for the 222 FRENCH REVIEW 91.3 Reviews 223 general reader, or for an undergraduate course, but which is detailed and nuanced enough for research or use in a graduate course. University of Memphis Melanie Conroy Ginio, Ruth. The French Army and its African Soldiers: The Years of Decolonization. Lincoln: UP of Nebraska, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8032-5339-1. Pp. 250. Ginio surveys France’s most desperate act to hold on to French West Africa, its former territories, via its army even after independence. Through a thorough examination of the protracted role played by the French Army, Ginio convincingly demonstrates how France had heavily invested in preventing the decolonization from being fulfilled in West Africa. The French army and its African soldiers will be the key component in a series of strategies and policies used by France to maintain its relations with that region. Beside the French army’s involvement in the usual warfare to consolidate its empire, it assumed most of the civilian responsibilities, such as education, social assistance, health, and participated feverishly, as Ginio puts it, in colonial decision making and in shaping the colonial agenda (xviii). Ginio is definitely the authoritative voice for conducting a work in this caliber given her constant...

Imagining the Postcolonial: Discipline, Poetics, Practice in Latin American and Francophone Discourse

Imagining the Postcolonial: Discipline, Poetics, Practice in Latin American and Francophone Discourse

Caregiving and Caregivers: An Important Part of the Healthcare Team.

As a home care and hospice consultant, I have written a newspaper column about caregiving in Sarasota County, Florida, a county with a median population age of 55 years (City-Data.com, n.d.) for many years. The following story is one of many I hear about every year. Sarah, an 86-year-old woman, has moved in with her adult daughter and son-in-law. My involvement began with a phone call from this very distraught couple who were trying to do the right thing and bring a family member into their home when it became obvious she was no longer safe on her own. This move did not occur with much forethought or planning; however, it soon became clear that Sarah was very demanding and difficult, and would not follow the doctor's recommendations nor theirs. The son and daughter-in-law work full time and have two children, ages 14 and 18, living at home. They related that, although Sarah had always been "prickly," her negative behaviors seemed magnified when she moved into their home. The last straw was when Sarah fired the aide they had hired to assist with her personal care. They knew they needed to regroup and develop a long-term plan that would be best for Sarah and her care needs.

“Om ʼn tamatie te kan vertrou”: plantpolitiek in Jeanne Goosen se Vrydag-rubrieke (1996-1999) en Plante kan praat (2010)

SummaryThe post-humanist intellectual rush to promote the interests of non-human communities has given rise to the establishment of critical plant studies, a new transdisciplinary field of study which has so far received little attention in South African literary criticism. Pollan (2002, 2013), Hall (2011), Chamovitz (2012), Marder (2013) and Mabey (2014) criticise the zoocentric favouring of human and nonhuman animals as subjects in the Western tradition and argue that this historic preference has resulted in the exclusion of plants as category for moral consideration. Matthew Hall's model of plant personhood and biospheric integrity, based on the inclusion of, and care and respect for plants as autonomous, complex life forms, is employed here to develop a terminology for revisiting selected texts by Jeanne Goosen. Hitherto unacknowledged newspaper columns (1996-1999) from the regional newspaper, Vrydag, as well as the short story, “Plante kan praat” (in the collection of short stories by the same name) will be considered in this ecocritical reading of said texts within the contours of contemporary plant studies.

The Sharing Economy as Primitive Accumulation: Locating the Political-Economic Position of the Capital-Extractive Sharing Economy

There has been much debate in the columns of newspapers as to how we should understand the sharing economy, but as yet, much of the debate is largely superficial, garnering little attention in terms of rigorous academic analysis. In this paper, I argue that the rise of the capital-extractive sharing economy model employed by companies like Uber and Airbnb cannot be understood outside of the political-economic context from which it emerges. Drawing on the work of Marxist scholars like David Harvey, I analyze such models through the lens of primitive accumulation, positioning their development as positive evidence of Harvey’s theory that capitalism seeks to colonize new spheres of social life in order to offload the tensions of its own internal conflicts; in this case, labour market insecurity. Further, I argue that the rise of the capital-extractive sharing economy should be recognized as constituting a further entrenchment of the global neoliberal project, particularly as it stands to affect union organizing, force deregulation in favour of free market fundamentals, and further deepen the labour market insecurity from which it rises in the first place.

A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy

Carolyn L. Karcher's superb study of the “writer-jurist-activist” Albion W. Tourgée's alliance with African Americans during the nadir of American race relations in the 1880s and 1890s usefully redirects scholarship on the era by taking seriously the stated intent of a white progressive (p. xi). Where the dominant paradigm in African American studies has left “no room for whites, except as racist oppressors or at best paternalistic do-gooders,” Karcher's perspective on her white subject is clear-eyed and nuanced (p. 334). Though Karcher does not shy away from Tourgée's shortcomings, in both politics and character, her subject emerges as a passionate advocate who risked what today we might call his “white privilege” to fight for the rights of African Americans. Karcher trains her attention on seven interrelated arenas in which Tourgée exerted himself for racial justice, with his involvement in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which he argued pro bono, being a highlight. Her analyses of Tourgée's correspondence with African American writers, editors, and activists (Charles Chesnutt and Ida B. Wells among them) and of his decade-long newspaper column “A Bystander's Notes” in the Chicago Daily Inter Ocean reveal the mutual respect and high regard that characterized Tourgée's relationship with his black compatriots. Karcher devotes a chapter to a contribution of Tourgée's that “historians of lynching have completely overlooked”: his efforts to end lynching in collaboration with Wells and Harry C. Smith (p. 198). The antilynching law that Tourgée drafted was adopted in Ohio in 1896, and it contained an ingenious provision: any county where a fatal lynching occurred would pay a penalty of $5,000. This financial burden, Tourgée believed, would have a deterrent effect “upon the real source of the evil—those who do not do the acts, but permit or encourage others to do them” (p. 232).

Benjamin Fagan. The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation.

Benjamin Fagan bases The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation on the primary narrative thread of black chosenness. He defines and defends this premise as a connecting theme present in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American newspapers. Working from this standpoint, Fagan pinpoints black newspaper publishers, several of whom were ministers, as the proponents of his black chosenness argument. The author also advances a secondary theme, arguing that a black nation existed within the American nation through the auspices of black newspaper articles and editorials. According to Fagan, the black chosen nation was alternately the New Israel, Babylon, or the wilderness, depending on the timing of the Civil War years (before, during, and after) and the readership of the individual black newspapers. Fagan’s unique text, which includes comparative American literature excerpts and biblical illustrations, primarily focuses on five African American periodicals, four printed in New York and one published in Canada. The author begins his study of black newspapers and black newspapermen by looking at Freedom’s Journal, America’s original African American paper, and its co-founders, the Reverend Samuel Cornish and the abolitionist John Brown Russworm. Fagan argues that the goal of their newspaper was to bring the Lord’s word to black readers by educating them in the social proprieties of white elite society. The author interprets Cornish’s didactic editorials as tutorials on “how to act chosen” (22). Expounding on this idea, Fagan uses biblical passages to suggest that Frederick Douglass’s North Star newspaper had the same intent: promotion of the black chosen nation. The author cites Douglass’s reporting of the French Revolution of 1848 as an example of the renowned abolitionist disagreeing with American exceptionalism but still supporting black chosenness. Fagan deduces that the North Star offered proof of the chosen black prophecy of deliverance, similar to the Israelites fighting against their Egyptian oppressors. The author insists that the North Star showed an interest in successful European revolutionary strategies in France and the British West Indies because it wanted to imitate these uprisings in slave-owning oppressive America. Fagan makes transnational connections throughout the pages of the North Star, including the formatting of newspaper columns and the ancestry of Douglass’s Scottish printer. The author, clarifying his black nation theme with examples of scripture, determines that the North Star had “uncoupled the promise of black chosenness from American identity” (94). Fagan could have strengthened this engaging historical position by situating the North Star’s Rochester newspaper office inside its western New York burned-over district. Free Soil Party newspapers, such as the Seneca County Courier, a paper Douglass supported because of its antislavery, temperance, and pro–woman’s rights stance, could have offered further contemporary interpretations of black chosenness.

The Capacities and Limitations of the Newspaper Column as a Tool for Creating the Image of Its Author

The aim of this paper is to verify the capacities and limitations of the newspaper column (understood as a genre) as a tool for creating the image of its author. In the paper, the distinguishing features of a column are first presented, and then a hypothesis is proposed for predicting which attributes of its author may be generated by the column’s features. This hypothesis is juxtaposed with the results of empirical research. The main task of this research was to read the texts of one of two Polish columnists – Krzysztof Varga and Szymon Hołownia – and subsequently answer questions indicating the authors’ attributes. This procedure made it possible to recreate the image of the text’s author. The results demonstrated the influence of the column’s distinguishing features on the image of its author inferred by readers.

A public theology discourse in practice: Perspectives from the oeuvre of Yolanda Dreyer

This article can serve as an overview of the work of Yolanda Dreyer, or as an introduction to her work, by conversing with her as a public theologian in the tradition of Schleiermacher. The article highlights her passion to listen to the voices that are normally ignored or to hear what needs to be heard to transform discourses. It investigates the contribution of Yolanda Dreyer to public theology with regard to the newspaper columns she has been writing for more than 17 years. It compares aspects of her public theology with the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, which can be characterised by an internalised spirituality and a critical hermeneutic of suspicion towards the abuse of power. Gender injustice and cultural criticism are prominent themes within Dreyer’s public theology. She emphasises the vocation to speak out, but also the necessity to listen. These contributions also characterise Dreyer as a pastor-theologian.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. FEC - Amicus Brief

At issue in Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. FEC, No. 18-5136 (D.C. Cir.), was whether government may trigger Track 1, political-committee(-like) burdens for an organization. Attached is a copyrighted draft—dated February 20, 2019—of the amicus brief that the author would have filed with the parties' consent—as indicated on page 1, footnote 5—in this second appeal in this challenge if the court had not dismissed the second appeal as premature on September 19, 2018, just as it dismissed the first appeal as premature on April 4, 2017. The Supreme Court has applied constitutional scrutiny and established the two-track system under which government may regulate—i.e., require disclosure of—political speech. E.g., Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 63-64, 79-82 (1976) (per curiam); Randy Elf, The Constitutionality of State Law Triggering Burdens on Political Speech and the Current Circuit Splits, 29 Regent U.L. Rev. 35, 35-37 & nn.1-12 (2016) (Triggering). This action does not address Track 2, non-political-committee disclosure requirements. Instead, this action addresses law triggering Track 1, political-committee(-like) burdens. Government may trigger such burdens only for “organizations” that are “under the control of” candidates in their capacities as candidates, or for “organizations” having “the major purpose” under Buckley, 424 U.S. at 79; Triggering at 48 & n.84, and engaging in more than small-scale speech, Sampson v. Buescher, 625 F.3d 1247, 1249, 1251, 1261 (10th Cir. 2010); Triggering at 62-64 & nn.153-54. One method of determining the Buckley major purpose asks whether an organization devotes the majority of its spending to contributions to, or independent expenditures for, candidates or ballot measures, Triggering at 60-61 & nn.147-50, with “independent expenditure” meaning Buckley express advocacy that is not coordinated with a candidate, id. at 36 n.9, 61 n.150, 67 & nn.168-71. No constitutional method of determining the Buckley major purpose includes independent spending other than independent expenditures properly understood. Id. at 60-61 & nn.149-50. This excludes Federal Election Campaign Act electioneering communications, id. at 68 & nn.176-78, and the appeal-to-vote test, id. at 60 n.148, 70 & n.184. Indeed, “the appeal-to-vote test—once known as the ‘functional equivalent of express advocacy’—no longer affects whether government may ban, otherwise limit, or regulate speech, and the appeal-to-vote test is vague. It has no place in law.” Id. at 77. The last page of the attached copyrighted draft is a newspaper column by the author. It summarizes Triggering and is cited in Triggering at 85 n.278.

Indonesia's Changing Political Economy: Governing the Roads

The Isan Culture Maintenance and Revitalization Programme was a four-year, 500,000- euro programme devised and implemented by four municipalities in Khon Kaen Province together with the College of Local Administration of Khon Kaen University in Northeast Thailand. The programme pursued five different action lines, with Ban Phai Municipality being responsible for traditionally made ethnic uniforms, Chum Phae Municipality for designing and installing multilingual signage, Khon Kaen Municipality for implementing the teaching of the Isan language as a subject in municipal schools, and Mueang Phon Municipality responsible for a multimedia collection of cultural performances. In effect, the programme piloted each of these four action lines in a given municipality and then sought to introduce each into the other three municipalities. The College of Local Administration was responsible for project coordination, research and visibility. The latter mainly took the forms of academic papers, research articles and newspaper columns. The principal results and outcomes of the programme included the first municipal multilingual Thai–Isan–English road signage in Northeast Thailand, the first Thai–Isan–English dictionary using a heritage script, the first Isan subject curriculum, a unique archive of Isan cultural performances, and the production of ethnic municipal and school uniforms.

Sayed Kashua’s Complaint against Philip Roth: Authorial Networking between East Jerusalem and Manhattan’s Upper West Side

ABSTRACT This paper highlights what seems to the author an insufficiently examined way of relating one writer to another: a writer’s decision to textually align him- or herself with another author. Intertextuality is usually not thought of as connecting two people or two authors, but rather two texts. This paper does the former by looking at how Sayed Kashua, an Israeli Arab author and journalist, uses the image of Philip Roth in his newspaper columns. First, Kashua establishes Roth’s status as an author who was maligned by his community and presented an inspiration for Kashua, who has himself been accused of self-hatred. Second, Kashua presents Roth as a merciless satirist, especially of Jewish life, and thus presents himself as a much milder, forgiving writer. Third, Kashua stresses that Roth is Jewish but not Israeli, while Kashua is Israeli but not Jewish. Roth’s position is only partially familiar and related to the Jewish Israeli public. Kashua stresses this position to foreground the way he too, as an Israeli Arab, is only half-familiar to this same audience.

Japanese Prostitutes in the North American West, 1877–1920. By Kazuhiro Oharazeki

The arresting opening sentence of this informative monograph — “Yamada Waka, a pioneering feminist writer…” — grabs the attention of readers familiar with early twentieth-century Japanese history. While Yamada is known for her contributions to the strikingly progressive feminist journal Seitô (Blue Stockings, 1911–16) and her subsequent prominence as a newspaper columnist and public figure in the women’s movement, few scholars today would be familiar with her time in the North American sex trade. Yamada worked as a prostitute serving Anglo customers in Seattle at the end of the nineteenth century under the name “Oyae of Arabia” and was later sold in San Francisco, before finding refuge in a Presbyterian mission. Kazuhiro Oharazeki uses Yamada’s story to open a discussion of his objectives: One goal is to recover the diversity of women’s experience in the immigrant community as alien Asian prostitutes facing legal, social, and gender discrimination, in ways that disrupt the settler narrative. A second goal is to scrutinize the dynamics of social reform (anti-prostitution) in the context of a transpacific discourse that would, by the late 1910s, curtail Japanese women’s participation in that trade.

On Relativism

On Relativism Avery Cardinal Dulles S.J. (1918–2008) IN A NEWSPAPER COLUMN after the first year of the Pope’s pontificate, John Allen wrote: “In terms of content, no one has to speculate about Benedict XVI’s most important teaching concern. He told us, the day before his election, in his homily Pro Eligendo Papa on April 18, 2005: the challenge to a ‘dictatorship of relativism’ in the developed West.”1 Allen’s prediction finds support in a long series of documents. As Prefect of the Congregation for Doctrine, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger frequently pointed to the evils of relativism. At Hong Kong in 1993, he called it “the gravest problem of our time,” and at Guadalajara in 1996, he called it “the central problem of faith for our time.”2 Ratzinger returns to the theme of relativism in several books published in English since he became pope, notably Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures and Without Roots: Europe, Relativism.3 From [End Page 729] these and a few other sources, we can piece together a fairly complete description of his critique. Origins of Relativism Relativism holds that mutually opposed points of view can all be valid. According to Ratzinger, relativism is an outgrowth of the metaphysical agnosticism of Immanuel Kant (TT, 126, 135). Rejecting the possibility of metaphysics in the usual sense, Kant held that the human mind can properly know only sensory “phenomena” or what can be logically deduced from them. Knowledge is therefore conditioned by appearances, which are relative to the observer. The absolute, Kant maintained, cannot be found within history or validly deduced from it, though earthly realities may be interpreted as pointing to it. Kant himself, while denying that we can strictly know eternal and necessary principles, avoided relativism by affirming that there were universal and necessary a priori forms of the intellect and postulates of practical reason that enjoyed the same universality. Making use of these postulates, the enlightened person could, in Kant’s opinion, construct a system of morals and a viable religion within the limits of reason alone without appeal to the supernatural. But Kant continued to hold that there can be no knowledge properly so called of transcendent realities.4 Nineteenth-century thinkers in the West, sharing Kant’s agnosticism, likewise stopped short of relativism. The dominant outlook was scientific positivism, a system that attempted to account for all reality on the basis of fixed mechanical laws. This system eliminated morality as a specific category. The favored theory was utilitarianism, which assessed the goodness and badness of human acts not on grounds of transcendental precepts or intrinsic values, but on the basis of their beneficial or harmful consequences.5 Moreover, socialists of various types attempted to construct a fully scientific explanation of society. Marxism was the last great effort to found a universally valid code of behavior and to lay the foundations of a new society. The collapse of Marxism in central and eastern Europe in 1989 brought about a profound disillusionment. Relativism has filled the resulting vacuum (TT, 116–17). [End Page 730] In WR, co-author Marcello Pera discusses two forms of contemporary philosophical relativism: contextualism and deconstructionism (Pera in WR, 11–22). Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers represent the first. They maintain that different cultures have their own rules of thinking and speaking. Different linguistic universes, they say, are incommensurable. What one community holds to be true, beautiful, and good is only so according to the criteria by which that community guides its judgment. There are no meta-criteria by which to judge what is universally true, beautiful, or good. Since all the criteria are contextual, relativism, they argue, must in the end prevail. The second form of relativism derives from Nietzsche and is masterfully represented by Jacques Derrida, who deconstructs supposedly universal concepts and assertions to show that they are self-contradictory. For this school of thinkers, there are no facts, only interpretations. The meaning of a text depends entirely on the subjectivity of the reader. Wittgenstein and Derrida have their disciples and peers in the United States. The names of Willard Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty, and John Caputo come to mind. But I shall not...

Professing in the Local Press: Professors and Public Responsibilities

This research examines the role of professors and print media within small communities, the townand- gown relationship between universities and the broader communities they inhabit, and the nature of the public discourse on important social issues on community, provincial, national, and international levels. Since 1996, professors at a small Canadian liberal arts and sciences university have contributed to and supported an op-ed column in a local newspaper serving a small rural and conservative city. Using survey research and personal interviews, this research attempts to understand the motivations of these professors to write columns and explores their understandings of what it means to be a public intellectual. This case study contributes to the literature on the sociology of intellectuals, and especially the study of academics and their roles as public intellectuals within modern universities and the broader communities they inhabit and in which they are engaged.

Towards (Back to?) a Philosophical Education

Born in 1936 in Turin (Italy), Gianni Vattimo hardly needs any introduction, as his pensiero debole (weak thought) has for decades been recognized as a major contribution contemporary philosophy. Vattimo graduated from the University of Turin under the supervision of his teacher and later friend Luigi Pareyson. Before being appointed as an assistant professor (1964), and later as a full professor of aesthetics (1969) at the same university, he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg as a Humboldt Scholarship recipient, where he studied under Hans-Georg Gadamer. In addition having led seminars and lectured at many institutions around the world, he has also served as a visiting professor at several universities in the United States including Yale, Los Angeles, New York University, and State University of New York. In the 1970s he served as dean of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy and from 1982 2009 he held the position of full professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Turin, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy. Among numerous honorary degrees and recognitions, Vattimo has received the Max Planck Award for Humanities (1992), the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking (2002), and the President's Medal from Georgetown University (2006), and was appointed a Grand Officer of the Italian Order of Merit in 1997. In 2010 he delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow and presently holds the position of vice president of the Academy of Latinity. Besides his academic career, Vattimo has also participated in and hosted several successful TV programmes for public Italian Television (Rai); moreover, his involvement in leftwing politics and numerous press columns in Italian and foreign newspapers has led him a career in politics: after his first mandate (1999-2004), he was re-elected, in 2009, as a deputy in the European Parliament.An original interpreter of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimo proposes an antifoundational philosophy whose postmetaphysical claims are not an attempt at overcoming (Uberwindung) previous lesser philosophical positions, but at turning them to new 'purposes' (Verwindung), as Richard Rorty has suggested. By prioritizing interpretation over description, Vattimo's weak thinking acknowledges the hermeneutical framework within which contemporary philosophy develops, and thus stands at the heart of postmodernist debate. His best-known works are The End of Modernity; The Transparent Society; The Adventure of Difference; Beyond Interpretation; Religion, co-edited with Jacques Derrida; Belief; After Christianity; Nihilism and Emancipation; The Future of Religion, co-authored with Richard Rorty; Not Being God, an autobiography co-authored with Piergiorgio Paterlini; Dialogue with Nietzsche; The Responsibility of the Philosopher; and Hermeneutic Communism, co-authored with Santiago Zabala.2The interviewer, Gabriel Serbu, is currently a second year Humanities Ph.D. student at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) under the supervision of Professor Santiago Zabala. His work deals with J. M. Coetzee's fiction in the context of philosophical hermeneutics. The interview took place in Turin (Italy) on 13 May 2016 and was translated from Italian by the interviewer.Gabriel Serbu [GS]: What has been the role of philosophical education in Western societies and what does it mean study philosophy?Gianni Vattimo [GV]: Actually, study philosophy is not a natural activity. Philosophy departments, for instance, have only been around since the eighteenth century or so, when the modern university was established. Before that, philosophy was, of course, still taught and studied, but often in very different forms. The study of philosophy as we know it is thus a historically conditioned activity, something that we have learned do within a certain tradition. This involves becoming both familiar with a series of traditional texts (including literary texts such as, for example, Rabelais's The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel) and aware of the history of the development of such a tradition. …

Nouvelles lettres de Berlioz, de sa famille, de ses contemporains ed. by Peter Bloom, Joël-Marie Fauquet, Hugh J. Macdonald, and Cécile Reynaud

Reviewed by: Nouvelles lettres de Berlioz, de sa famille, de ses contemporains ed. by Peter Bloom, Joël-Marie Fauquet, Hugh J. Macdonald, and Cécile Reynaud Ralph P. Locke Nouvelles lettres de Berlioz, de sa famille, de ses contemporains. Edited by Peter Bloom, Joël-Marie Fauquet, Hugh J. Macdonald, and Cécile Reynaud. (Correspondance générale, IX, suppléments 2.) Arles and Venice: Actes Sud/Palazzetto Bru Zane, 2016. [ 788 p. ISBN 9782330062552 (paperback). i30.] Illustrations, bibliography, indexes. In 1860, Richard Wagner was in Paris, trying to arrange for the Opéra to give the world premiere of the revised version of Tannhäuser. In a letter probably written in May of that year, Hector Berlioz invited him to come over to dine. The various guests that evening, he promised, will share "a very lovely pineapple" direct from Brazil. And, after everyone else leaves, he and Wagner "will have the freedom to spend time together in my study." Presumably he meant that the two would talk about topics of common interest, such as the Parisian musical world or the recent activities of their mutual friend Franz Liszt. Berlioz's "pineapple letter" has now been published for the first time in the book under review (pp. 548–49). It was apparently written later than any other that survives between these great musicians. (They did meet again two months later at Pauline Viardot's house for an advance hearing of parts of Tristan und Isolde.) Earlier that same year, Berlioz had written a sharply disapproving newspaper column about Wagner's musical style. Still, the friendliness evident in this letter shows him interested in maintaining an active relationship [End Page 102] with Wagner based on an open exchange of views. The pineapple letter will, I hope, lead commentators to be more cautious when they—or we, for I am as guilty as anybody in this—write, or tell students, about a supposed sudden and complete breakdown in the relationship between these two bold spirits during the last decade of Berlioz's life. This is just one of many revelations to be encountered in a major new book, whose title in English would be New Letters of Berlioz, His Family, and His Contemporaries. The title page (but not the front cover) adds a series title: Hector Berlioz, Corre -spondance générale IX, suppléments 2. The book is thus the final volume in the much-praised edition of all surviving letters—and any that were transcribed before the original sources were lost—written by the composer or to him (by family members, friends, professional colleagues, and government officials). The Correspondance générale—a title that scholars often abbreviate as Corr. gén. or CG—was published by the Paris firm Flammarion between 1974 and 2003. Its eight volumes may be found in numerous libraries around the world. The primary volumes (Corr. gén. I–VII), edited under the supervision of Pierre Citron, were arranged chronologically. Correspondance générale VIII, edited by Hugh Macdonald, is an 850–page supplement that provides numerous corrections and makes available letters that had become known too late to be included in the relevant chronological volume. Since the publication of the first supplemental volume in 2003, hundreds more letters have surfaced. This is in part a tribute to the success of the Correspondance générale itself. Other factors have helped as well, such as: (1) the increased speed of communications between scholars—and between scholars and archivists—that has made it easier to locate a letter and then consult it, perhaps in a photocopy or scan; (2) more letters finding their way from private hands into public libraries, notably the important Richard Macnutt Collection, now in Paris at the Bibliothèque nationale de France;(3) access by the editors of Nouvelles lettres to transcriptions of many letters that reside in distant libraries or in private collections;(4) the inclusion in this volume of a number of transcriptions (often incomplete) that have appeared across the decades in catalogs of rare-book dealers. By any kind of logic, Nouvelles lettres (Corr. gén. IX) should have been published—like the preceding eight volumes—by Flammarion...

"Tesettür" as an Islamist anti-fashion ideology in the Turkish Republic (1960s-1990s)

The aim of this article is the examination of the historical development of as an Islamist anti-fashion ideology against the secular Kemalist fashion politics in Turkey and its relationship to other forms of fashion/dress within the context of a Turkish multi-fashion system. For this purpose, the paper will conduct a discourse analysis of monographs, journal articles and newspaper columns of female Islamic writers from different eras of political Islam, who have dominated the formulation of the tesettur ideology. The article states first that the emergence and change of the tesettur ideology and of its outlook mirrors the development of political Islam in Turkey, like the transition from islamism to post-islamism. Second, the article asserts that the emergence of tesettur as a practice and ideology is also a result of the genuine state centered and authoritarian nature of Turkish modernization. As a consequence the paper hopes to provide a valuable contribution about the role of dress as a site of political struggle in a specific historical political context.

Dialogic Discourses of French and English in Acadie

Debate in the Acadian media over the quality of the French language is a recurrent aspect of sociolinguistic life in this region of French Canada. In the fall of 2012, this debate was relaunched by an incendiary newspaper column, written by a Quebec-based journalist, questioning whether the French spoken by young Acadian musicians was really a language at all. Based on twelve interviews conducted shortly after this debate, this article examines how university students in Acadie take up these media discourses about the quality of the French language. In general, the students interviewed regarded the French language as inherently rule-bound and structured, in contrast to English, which many held to be comparatively without rules, even easygoing. The author suggests that this particular view has developed in part because of exposure to discussion over the quality of French in Acadie, and that any attempt to improve what is perceived as the poor quality of French in Acadie cannot ignore the very terms in which it portrays the French language. These figurations become part of the linguistic ideologies of young French speakers in Acadie and potentially feed into the very state of affairs that commentators lament.

Dorothy Day's Fictionalized Family

In 1931 Dorothy Day, who was in need of cash, wrote a newspaper column, True Story Fictionalized , for the Staten Island Advance . Recently discovered, the column provides valuable insight into a variety of her post-conversion and pre-Catholic Worker concerns. As she struggled with her romantic partner over formalizing their relationship in sacramental marriage, writing the column enabled her to vicariously explore the daily life of an intact Catholic nuclear family and to advance her campaign to win him over to her position by presenting the daily pleasures of family life. Additionally, the column showed Day's belief in simple living, which preceded Catholic Worker voluntary poverty, and focuses on a Catholic family as good neighbors in a diverse community. The column offers a rare opportunity to gauge Day's presentation of her social views to a diverse readership prior to Peter Maurin's influence.