Pages Of Text Research Articles

The Value of James Joyce by Margot Norris

Reviewed by: The Value of James Joyce by Margot Norris John Whittier-Ferguson Margot Norris. The Value of James Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016. 157 pp. Margot Norris is always worth reading on James Joyce. Her first book, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (1976), showed me and many other aspiring Joyceans of my generation not only a way to read the Wake (and a way to use theory productively in English studies—a lesson that was to become even more important in the decade to come) but also why that reading might matter in aesthetic, sociopolitical, and psychological terms. Her more extensive, ambitious study of Joyce's oeuvre, Joyce's Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism (1992), brought her formidable abilities to bear on Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses as well. Norris has remained a writer who has never let Joyce's famous difficulties obscure her arguments for the importance of his writings as works of revolutionary art that are always morally and ethically engaged. Her readings of his prose have been so compelling, her formulations of the stakes of those readings so provocative, that she has served not simply as an exegete of these challenging texts; I know from using her books and articles in my own classrooms for many years now that she is a writer whose work recruits new Joyceans to the fold. Her postmillennial projects concerning Joyce are therefore particularly fitting: she has edited a fine edition of Dubliners (2006) in the Norton Critical Editions series. She has published Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses (2011), an intriguing experiment in what we might discover if we approach Joyce as naive readers, fresh to the text and untutored (but also uncontaminated) by the shelves on shelves of criticism that threaten to obscure the blue book of Eccles. Even [End Page 390] her Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners (2003), which is pitched more to the critic than the beginning student, nevertheless keeps the classroom and readers new to Joyce in mind. Indeed, in this text as well as the 2011 Ulysses study, she employs her titular "virgin reading" approach, reading each story as though for the first time and thereby recapturing the strangeness, the surprises, the questions that we may long since have decided were answered or resolved. Her most recent contribution to the field, The Value of James Joyce, is the most hospitably open-armed of her studies to date. This brief introduction (a little over a hundred pages of text) is a thematically organized guidebook to Joyce's work, from Dubliners through Finnegans Wake. It is perfectly in keeping with Norris's enterprise over the past decade that her latest invitation to Joyceans-in-the-making opens with an introduction and first chapter concerning themselves with "Democratic and Cosmopolitan Joyce" and "The Significance of the Ordinary" in this challenging writer's prose. Emphasizing the demotic, humanistic Joyce for his "ability to fascinate both highbrow academics and ordinary readers" (1), Norris celebrates Joyce's relevance and his appeal: "his willingness to exercise a remarkable generosity in his embrace of all that is human" (2). This generosity is Norris's, too, as she offers new readers ways into Joyce that are themselves of obvious interest and importance. "The value of Joyce's work," she tells us, with characteristic lucidity and conviction at the end of her introduction, "lies in its enormous efforts to enrich our concept of the human—the aim of all art, to be sure, but achieved here in particularly broad and complicated ways" (6). In her examination of "the ordinary" in Dubliners and Portrait, Norris is not only helpful but often revelatory. For examples of the fruits of her studiously down-to-earth approach, I'd single out her descriptions of the psychological and financial intricacies that bind Corley and Lenehan together in "Two Gallants"; her discussion of what occurs in "Counterparts," which turns out "to be the tragedy of the death of the ordinary, of life when ordinariness is imploded at every turn by the drama of human needs, urges, pressures, and violence" (19); and her astute presentation of how much is mundane and daily...

Stalin's Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers became Hitler's Collaborators, 1941-1945, by Mark Edele [Book Review

REVIEWS 793 Edele, Mark. Stalin’s Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers became Hitler’s Collaborators, 1941–1945. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2017. xv + 205 pp. Figure. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £60.00: $80.00. 2017 saw the publication of a number of blockbuster tomes examining the history of the Russian Revolution or the Stalinist period, several of which exceeded a thousand pages in length. In this slim volume, Mark Edele succeeds in making no less an impact. Stalin’s Defectors is a remarkable book, in that it packs in masses of new empirical research, advances new methodologies for interrogating historical statistics, and offers a new interpretation of the behaviour of Soviet Prisoners of War (POWs), contributions which have implications for understanding Stalinism. All of this, and more, in fewer than 180 pages of main text. Sometimes good things really do come in small packages. Stalin’s Defectors offers the first systematic analysis of frontline surrender by Soviet soldiers to the Germans. The focus is on those soldiers who voluntarily laid down their arms and crossed over to the enemy, not POWs as a whole. The scale of this phenomenon, as Edele demonstrates, was unprecedented, representing a significant problem for the Red Army. Even the most conservative estimates dwarf the scale of defections in any other Allied army. Defectors, particularly Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army, have long sat at the centre of scholarly debates, but no previous study has drawn on such rigorous research. Edele weaves together German and Soviet archival materials, published and unpublished memoirs, diaries and interviews from both sides. This data helps reconstruct who Red Army defectors were, how many they numbered, how and why they crossed the lines. The actions of this group, although a minority in the Red Army, reveal much about Stalinist society, allowing a re-examination of whether the war served as an ‘acid-test’ for the regime. Despite a small minority of loyal and oppositional defectors, most Soviet combatants were motivated by physical survival rather than ideology. As Edele argues, ‘This might have been a war of ideologies, but not everybody caught up in it was ideologically motivated’ (p. 10). The book consists of nine short chapters, which methodically break down its research questions, placing them within a wider historiographical context. Chapter one serves as an introduction, detailing the problem, questions, and sources to be explored, and introduces Major Ivan Nikitch Kononov, a high-profile defector who crossed the lines with a regiment of his men. Edele returns to Kononov’s exceptional story regularly in subsequent chapters, but prefigures the outline of his remarkable story here. Chapter two evaluates the number of defectors, but in so doing confronts the difficulties of definition SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 794 and classification of captives, deserters and defectors. On the frontlines the boundaries between prisoners and defectors were very unclear; enemy troops had some flexibility in categorizing defectors. A distinction also needs to be drawn between the scale of desertions in 1941, for which systematic data is missing, and in 1942–45. Here, Edele makes his methodological pitch for carefully engaging with historical statistics, using them to supplement cultural methods. Chapter three examines the difficulties defectors faced in changing sides; the costs and risks of which were extraordinary. Getting across the lines amidst battle presented a practical challenge, but the Red Army and Soviet party-state also created its own barriers by combining, ‘atrocity propaganda with threats to the life and freedom of the defectors and their families’ (p. 39). German bullets, the reality of camp regimes and German war-crimes also served as a powerful disincentive. Chapter four follows on by examining a range of scenarios when these barriers were surmounted. Chapter five explores the composition of defectors in sociological terms, offering important insights: ‘The collectivity of deserters across the front line was considerably more complex than any collective singular could express’ (p. 94). Indeed, defectors ‘recruited themselves from all sectors of Soviet society’ (p. 77). Non-Russian nationalities, older age groups and labouring classes were more likely to defect than other groups, but young Russian men remained a high proportion of defectors. Interrogating the motivations behind defection, the subject of chapter...

On Being Criticized

On Being Criticized Grace Lavery (bio) Several of the Essays which are here collected and reprinted had the good or the bad fortune to be much criticised at the time of their first appearance. I am not now going to inflict upon the reader a reply to those criticisms; for one or two explanations which are desirable, I shall elsewhere, perhaps, be able some day to find an opportunity; but, indeed, it is not in my nature,—some of my critics would rather say, not in my power,—to dispute on behalf of any opinion, even my own, very obstinately. —Matthew Arnold1 But all his homeless reverence, revolted, cried: "I am my father's forum and he shall be heard, Nothing shall contradict his holy final word, Nothing." And thrust his gift in prison till it died, And left him nothing but a jailor's voice and face, And all rang hollow but the clear denunciation Of a gregarious optimistic generation That saw itself already in a father's place. —W. H. Auden2 In Criticism A history of literary criticism derived from the "Acknowledgements" pages of the genre's major texts might tell us a number of things we already know. Chiefly, it might confirm that while the particularities of marital devotion with which such encomia traditionally conclude have changed since F. R. Leavis reported [End Page 499] writing out of a "sense of my immeasurable indebtedness" to his wife and colleague Queenie, and our more familiar paeans to my most assiduous reader, the couple form itself has proven more durable than readers who skip over the paratext may have felt inclined to predict.3 Yet the language of debt—which Leavis, conventionally enough, treats as a prior condition of writing literary criticism—conceals as much as it reveals. Since the body of The Great Tradition concludes with a celebration of the "really great" Joseph Conrad, for instance, a reader might be interested to learn that the phrase "sense of immeasurable indebtedness" is taken (presumably unwittingly—but, seriously, who knows?) from Conrad's 1919 essay "The Crime of Partition," an encomiastic acknowledgement of what the Collier's editor calls "the 'irrepressible vitality' of the Polish nation."4 In that case, however, Conrad insists that "a sense of immeasurable indebtedness" will not serve as a basis for self-determination, since any such gratitude "is always at the mercy of weariness and is fatally condemned by the instability of human sentiment to end in negation" ("The Crime of Partition," 40). Leavis, no doubt, can hardly be faulted for having failed consciously to register any wariness around the language of debt in Conrad's argument. Leavis's flagging, paratactical syntax seems to know as his lexis does not that criticism has not been born, sinless, from a sentimental attachment: "my sense of my immeasurable indebtedness, in every page of this book, to my wife cannot be adequately expressed, and I cannot express it at all without an accompanying consciousness of short-comings—no one but myself has any part in them—that makes me insist at the same time on my claim to all the responsibility" (The Great Tradition, 7). Any attempt to embed the work of criticism in the social and psychic network glimpsed, disavowed, exhibited, or peacocked in such textual acknowledgements would inevitably have to confront a countervailing account that might call itself "Arnoldian"—an account according to which any critical project worth the name must begin by divesting itself of such "interest" in the pursuit of "the object as in itself it really is."5 The source for such an argument would likely be Matthew Arnold's essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," which is generally taken to argue (to two readerships: poorly-read but sentimental romantic poets and philistine British liberals) that the critical enterprise must absent itself from practical concerns. "[L]et criticism leave church-rates and the franchise alone," as Arnold puts it ("The Function of Criticism," 273). The purpose of this article, however, is to render such a rebuttal more difficult by demonstrating that Matthew Arnold himself, relentlessly and at substantial psychic expense, understood criticism as a socially embedded act of...

The National States Rights Party: A History by Michael Newton

Reviewed by: The National States Rights Party: A History by Michael Newton Elizabeth M. Nix The National States Rights Party: A History. By Michael Newton. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2017. Pp. viii, 268. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4766-6603-7.) The National States Rights Party: A History by Michael Newton recounts in exacting detail the history of the fascist organization that nominated Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus for the U.S. presidency in 1960. Founded in 1958, the National States Rights Party (NSRP) recruited dues-paying members as long as they were Christian and "loyal white racists" (p. 210). However, the organization was less a political party than a conglomeration of white supremacists that published a long-lived newsletter, the Thunderbolt. Newton quotes one unnamed founder as remarking, "Without The Thunderbolt we are just another Klan or White Citizens Council" (p. 51). The NSRP loosely organized racists and fascists under the leadership of Jesse Benjamin "J. B." Stoner Jr. and Edward Reed Fields, two educated men who did not hide behind hoods but sought out the spotlight to advance their bigotry. The strength of Newton's work is his chronological collection of primary documents produced by hate groups, an archive he has been building since age fourteen. One of the book's images is a 1954 flyer from the Realpolitical Institute with the slogan "Whiteman Awake—The Hour Is Late!" (p. 48). There is also an image of a membership form for the NSRP, guaranteeing members "a sword of steel that will cut away the chains that shackle the White-man in America" (p. 49). Newton includes NSRP documents between 1958 and 1980 in appendixes and transcribes the entire contents of lengthy letters in the text. No one today can read this book without drawing parallels to America's current toxic racial situation. The clean-cut white men in collared shirts waving Confederate flags at the University of Alabama to protest the admission of black coed Autherine Lucy in 1956 would not have looked out of place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. In a letter to Elijah Muhammad, J. B. Stoner wrote, "To every place it has spread, Islam has been a blight and brought darkness," indicating that the Far Right targeted Muslims long before September 11, 2001 (p. 39). When NSRP members were charged in the bombing of an Atlanta synagogue in 1958, their allies printed headlines in the American Nationalist asserting "Synagogue Bombing a Fraud" and "Jewish Groups Use Bomb Incident to Confuse Gentiles," precursors to Alex Jones's conspiracy theories (p. 58). The Thunderbolt is a print version of the Daily Stormer, indicating the NSRP's understanding of the power of media to organize far-flung, like-minded individuals. On their membership forms, NSRP members pledged to oppose "Internationalism" andtosupport "Only White Christian Immigration … America First and American Patriotism," phrases familiar to anyone in twenty-first-century America (p. 49). [End Page 794] This volume is the twelfth book about hate groups or organized crime that Newton has published with McFarland and Company. He is clearly in familiar territory and assumes his readers are as well. The encyclopedic nature of this history forces the reader to work hard to extract any analysis or narrative. In this book's 207 pages of text, Newton introduces hundreds of individuals without including contextual descriptors. For example, Edward Reed Fields is profiled in the first chapter, but we learn that he was a founder of the NSRP in chapter 3. Michael Newton has authored over three hundred books, many of them encyclopedias. In this slim volume he offers an illustrated chronology, supported by information from sources including metapedia.org, which defines itself as a pro-European alternative online encyclopedia. Steeped in the world of hate groups since he was a teenager, Newton provides a collection of racist memorabilia that sadly is not dead and is not even past. Elizabeth M. Nix University of Baltimore Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century ed. by Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons

Reviewed by: Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century ed. by Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons John Deak Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. Edited by peter crooks and timothy h. parsons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xxii, 474 pp. $126.00 (hardcover); $35.99 (paper); $29.00 (ebook). This volume of eighteen essays, spanning over 450 pages of text, collectively examines the intersection of empire and bureaucracy. Call them what you will: bean-counters, pedants, mustachioed Napoleons in love with their arbitrary authority, officials—"bureaucrats" is not necessarily a neutral term—were necessary for princes, kings, emperors, trading and colonial corporations, and imperial governments to project power and build and maintain their empire. Empires have been with us for millennia, but how did they "rule over different peoples across vast expanses of space and time?" Following the "imperial turn," which has established how much empires have been the rule and nation-states the exception, these essays ask how "real empires actually ran" (p. 3). Together these eighteen essays, including a very good introductory essay by the editors, examine empires in terms of their bureaucracies, the officials who did the work of ruling. Their subject then, is not on the discourses and mentalities that undergirded the economies of empires and the internalization of discipline, but rather on the "formal institutions of imperial governance" (p. 7). This is admittedly history of the old school, but one that has been informed by the accumulation of knowledge and practices of the social and cultural histories. [End Page 433] The essays themselves span a breathtaking breadth of time and space. Patricia Ebrey contributes an examination of bureaucracy in Song China (960–1276 a.d.). She argues that Chinese officials provided the necessary infrastructure to govern over 100 million subjects with relative effectiveness and stability. István T. Kristó-Nagy writes about Arab rulers and Persian administrators in the early years of Arab-Islamic conquest. From there we move forward in time to the Incan Empire (Chris Given-Wilson) and the Ottoman Empire (Karen Barkey). These essays help expand our idea of administrators, who they were and what they did, and how often enough they could come up with effective ways of projecting power from the center. From there, the book shifts back to the center of Europe with five essays covering the period from the late Roman Empire to the Middle Ages. Michael Whitby argues in an essay on the late Roman Empire that it was above all administrative competence combined with a unified and unifying culture that glued the disparate pieces of the Roman Empire together. A strong essay by John Haldon on bureaucracy in Byzantium makes the argument that the Eastern Roman Empire was indeed a bureaucratic state. It was the deeply-rooted institutions, staffed by Byzantine officials, which allowed the empire to weather crises. Moreover, the bureaucracy itself, belonging to a common social class, could forge connections with one another—often enough providing flexibility to a system that may have looked more rigid on paper than it actually was or needed to be. Essays follow on Carolingian military administration, for bureaucrats were often needed to raise and maintain an army; the crisis of the English State and the Angevin Empire in the turn of the thirteenth century (John Gillingham); and an essay on the importance of the word and the medium of parchment in the Late Middle Ages (Len Scales). Finally, Peter Crooks contributes an essay on England and the "brittleness of bureaucracy" from 1259 to 1453. The last section of six essays turns to the modern period and the commercial empires of Spain, Britain, and France. Christopher Storrs' essay on Spain elaborates on how an effective bureaucracy gave way to encroachment by local elites in the New World, so much so that when Spain sought to reassert its authority by promoting administrative efficiency in the early nineteenth century, it provoked resentment among its colonial subjects. Jack P. Greene's essay on Britain's overseas empire echoes this sentiment, the American colonies being a case in point. A wonderful essay by Michael Broers on Napoleon's empire...

Muslim Americans in the Military

Edward E. Curtis IV is one of the most important scholars of Islam in theUnited States. This slim volume is a welcome addition to his work, andshould be required reading for all who are interested in the place of Muslimswithin the history of America. One also wishes that the book be readwidely by American Muslims. As the latter day prophet, Bob Marley, oncesang about other soldiers in the Americas, “If you know your history/ Then you would know where you’re coming from.” Curtis’ book helps us, asAmerican Muslims, to learn about our own history in our country.The book is not written for a specialized audience, and could easily beused by undergraduate or even senior high school students in a number ofcourses on Islam or religion in America. It is a very short volume, comingin at 82 pages of text with a single additional page of notes. The book is dividedinto five chapters of roughly equal length. The first chapter introducesthe contemporary issues of American Muslim soldiers in the United Statesarmed forces through the stories of Captain Humayun Khan and CorporalKareem Rashad Sultan Khan. Corporal Khan became widely known whena photo of his mother, Elsheba, cradling his gravestone was mentioned byGeneral Colin Powell in the 2008 election. Captain Khan’s introduction tothe American public was more recent, when his father, Khizr, spoke abouthis son’s sacrifice on the final night of the Democratic National Conventionin 2016 ...

Ordinary Things, Ordinary Lives, Ordinary Days Across the Centuries

Ordinary Things, Ordinary Lives, Ordinary Days Across the Centuries Paul G. E. Clemens (bio) Joseph A. Amato. Everyday Life: How the Ordinary Became Extraordinary. London: Reaktion Books, 2016, 256 pp. References, acknowledgements, index. $25.00. Rebecca K. Shrum. In the Looking Glass: Mirrors & Identity in Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 221 pp. Figures, acknowledgements, notes, and index. $54.95. Everyday histories, or daily histories, across time and space, ancient to modern, a Braudelian sweep of the world, all in 200 pages of text. Best to begin reading at the end. The acknowledgements. Joseph Amato tells us that "[n]eedless to say, my sense of the everyday has its deepest roots in my own childhood and family. Nostalgia [a powerful and positive characterization throughout this reflection] makes what was my secure and cared-for youth one and whole—and a standard of what a desirable youth should be" (p. 242). A brick house in Detroit, stay-at-home mom—"resourceful, quick-tempered and generous"; a "loyal, stoic father"; a neighborhood rich in trees and peopled by the children of Eastern European, Canadian and German immigrants; a job at age eleven as a caddy at Grosse Pointe Farms; a "public education and a democratic point of view, sharpened by a militant unionism and an unquestioned allegiance to the Democratic Party of Roosevelt and Truman"—all this has shaped a lifetime of writing social history and about daily life (p. 242). Amato came to think of his mother's family as "my American family" and his father's as "my Italian [family] (p. 242). On his mother's side, a family "who literally dug themselves west along the Great Lakes from the Erie Canal until in the 1850s they finally settled in Wisconsin" (p. 243); on his father's, more recent Sicilians from "the Madonie Mountains in northeastern Sicily" (p. 242). Autobiography and Amato's own family history—his families' journeys from traditional life to modern life—crop up throughout the book and provide background for his reflections on the history of daily life and methods of studying that history. Around the books he has read, the many he has written, and the perambulations of his family, Amato speculates about 10,000 years of changes in daily life, up to a moment when "village and peasant, local and regional societies [End Page 553] increasingly lost their autonomy and capacity to assimilate outside influences," a point in time where one's "[m]ind leaps traditional borders and temporal boundaries," and "follows imagination, affinity and empathy where they lead, making ordinary days of life extraordinary days of mind" (p. 187). His acknowledgements also cite one of his mentors, Eugene Weber, whose Peasants into Frenchmen, succinctly captured this story in a specific place and time; just as tellingly, among the four individuals Amato thanks for their role in helping him "democratically… celebrate the long and extraordinary making of everyone's everyday life" is poet and friend Dana Yost, excerpts of whose poems conclude the book, and suggest to Amato, and the reader, how "historians must follow poets in their approach to the everyday world" (p. 206). Everyday Life, then, is neither an attempt to define its subject fully nor a comprehensive "how-to-do-it" guide to writing about daily life. It provides instead an overarching template for talking about the history of daily life rooted in material culture and economics. Amato admires the work of Fernand Braudel, but gives more consideration to psychology, cultural history, and politics than the Annales school did. The schema is essentially tripartite—traditional, modern, and a contemporary world, a modern world in which we have become "strangers to our own past," the ordinary has become extraordinary, and the "fixed and bounded" has become the "unleased and boundless" (p. 194). The Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution mark the extended transition from the first (traditional) to the second (modern) stage; the emergence of the contemporary self, awash in a world of choices that cut ties to place and past, brings us to our current stage in which "habit-packed nuclei at the centre of daily life no longer holds" (p. 195). The engine of change is "an increment...

Lincoln and Congress by William C. Harris

Reviewed by: Lincoln and Congress by William C. Harris Peter Charles Hoffer Lincoln and Congress. William C. Harris. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8093-3571-8. 176 pp., cloth, $24.95. Can an entire life of research and writing be encapsulated in a short book? William Harris's Lincoln and Congress proves that it can. This is familiar ground trod by the boots of countless scholars. There is so much going on in it that the challenge seems almost insurmountable. But Harris has written over a dozen books on the Lincoln–Civil War era, and no one knows this ground more thoroughly than he. Harris's work here is both concise and learned, and, most important, its judgment is almost always persuasive. Balance is Harris's organizing principle. As was Lincoln's. Harris is prudent in his views. So was Lincoln. Long a Whig before a Republican, Lincoln was wont to let Congress manage its own affairs, which in practice meant that he had to bear, with stoic patience, criticism of his actions and his inaction. When the war came, Lincoln had to balance the exigencies of domestic insurrection with the reality of Confederate belligerency and the need for expedition with constitutional restraints on the executive. He needed to reach out for congressional support, knowing that a good portion of both houses, even with the southern democracy removing itself, was jealous of its own prerogatives. Within Congress, pro-Union Democrats sought to reassure their own constituencies while giving Lincoln only grudging support. The more reform-minded Republicans battled the more conservative members of their own party, leaving Lincoln in no-man's land. Harris deftly manages this three-ring circus with a series of this-but-that summaries. He concludes that Lincoln and Congress formed an effective "partnership" despite "tension and conflict" to win the war, abolish slavery, and begin to heal the nation's wounds (7). Perhaps Harris is too ready to give credit and forgive transgressions, [End Page 385] again assuming a stance that Lincoln himself appeared to prefer. For example, concluding that the 37th Congress "had achieved a remarkable record" is a little too fulsome (75). Then again, when a scholar has spent so much of his time and energy studying a man like Lincoln, some Lincoln must rub off on the scholar. Harris's prose is a nice mixture of the stately and the dramatic, as he follows the "lively debate" over emancipation in the District and the "endless" debate over the militia bill (37, 38). Harris knows that tracing out all of these debates over the course of the wartime Congresses would not only turn a succinct book of 135 pages of text into a multivolume monster, it would also overwhelm the ordinary reader in names, dates, and detail. Thus, Harris had to select which measures, and which debates over those measures, deserved his attention. Following the rule that a topic had to be important for the development of the nation-state as well as at the time, his choices—confiscation, emancipation, finance, the development of western lands and eastern industry, rules for the conduct of war, and tests of separation of powers—hit the mark. Lincoln was prone to fits of abject despair, but as Senator Orville Browning privately told the president after a brush-up between him and congressional leaders of his own party, "the fortunes of the country are bound up with our fortune and you must stand firmly at your post" (64). Plainly, Harris agrees. There is one topic that a reader might believe Harris slighted. Most of the recent accounts of Lincoln, the war, and Congress focus on the emancipation issue. Harris does not ignore it, but neither does he give it more space than disputes over military affairs or Lincoln's plan for reconstruction. What he does show is how reluctant Lincoln was to accord freed slaves the full panoply of civil rights and liberties. Suffrage for blacks was the sticking point in the last days of Lincoln's first term. The account of the Sumner-Trumbull dispute over the Louisiana bill's exclusion of black voters shows how politically astute Lincoln's hesitation was...

Between Avant-Garde and Kitsch: Deconstructing Art and/as Ideology

Between Avant-Garde and Kitsch:Deconstructing Art And/As Ideology Colin Gardner (bio) Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda by Joes Segal. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. 176 Pp., 30 illustrations. $18.99 paper. In a now infamous speech to the US House of Representatives on August 16, 1949, Congressman George Dondero (Republican from Michigan) railed against modern art, particularly abstraction, as a communist threat to true American values. "What are these isms that are the very foundation of so-called modern art?" he asked. "I call the roll of infamy without claim that my list is all-inclusive: dadaism, futurism, constructionism, suprematism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstractionism. All these isms are of foreign origin, and truly should have no place in American art. While not all are media of social or political protest, all are instruments and weapons of destruction…."1 Meanwhile, working covertly and independently of Congress and using secret funding provided by a number of CIA front organizations (most notably the Congress of Cultural Freedom under the leadership of Michael Josselson), these so-called "weapons of destruction"—specifically Abstract Expressionism— were being harnessed by the United States Information Agency (USIA) as the epitome of American freedom of expression against totalitarian Soviet state propaganda and its officially sanctioned artistic style, socialist realism. The innate contradictions of art's role in the Cold War context—modernism as both quintessentially American and sub-versively communist—are further [End Page 123] complicated when one considers Clement Greenberg's distinction between avant-garde and kitsch in his eponymous 1939 essay in which he lionizes abstract painting as the ultimate realization of modern art's historical mission—i.e., absolute artistic purity whereby, following the tenets of Gotthold Lessing's Laocoön (1766), painting can only be about painting as the subject of its own innate process.2 Work with an overt political or social message cannot be considered art but is instead kitsch or propaganda, which, drawing upon the simula-crum of genuine culture, merely imitates art's effects. In Greenberg's eyes, the latter's cultural philistinism would conveniently relegate socially conscious artists such as Ben Shahn, Diego Rivera, and Philip Evergood to the same level as Stalinist hacks such as Isaak Brodsky. Clearly, given these examples, any attempt to create a clear-cut opposition between "political" or "activist" art on the one hand (Greenberg's kitsch) and "purely autonomous" art on the other (Greenberg's avant-garde) is not only spurious but also irresponsibly unhistorical. In his brilliantly incisive new book, Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda, Joes Segal sets out to deconstruct this false binary by showing that "politicians and government agencies may project their own ideas, interests and fears on artworks. This is due to the fact that the visual arts cannot easily be reduced to unambiguous statements or clear-cut arguments" (8). In contrast, he argues, the political meaning of art "is in no way restricted to artworks with a declared political intention. The most interesting cases tend to be those works which at first sight are politically ambiguous or have no political meaning at all" (9). In short, "In this collection of essays I use another perspective by analyzing the political implications of the very idea of a pure and apolitical modern art" (9). Using a carefully considered case study approach, Segal traces the ambivalent relationship between art and politics over a hundred-year span from 1914 to 2014. Obviously, given the book's limited length (a very tight 136 pages of text), Segal has been highly selective and acknowledges some key omissions: the relationship of Futurism to Italian Fascism; art during the Spanish Civil War (Picasso's Guernica is thus conspicuously absent); the clash between modern, socialist, and religious imagery in 1970s Iran; the competing art traditions in North and South Korea; as well as issues of identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Nonetheless, his choices raise enough key points that they can be easily cross-referenced into other artistic and nationalist contexts, both within and outside the confines of the book. Thus Segal covers a wide range of nationalist paradigms, [End Page 124] including the public debates on art and identity in...

Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life by Emily Steinlight

Reviewed by: Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life by Emily Steinlight Joanna Hofer-Robinson Emily Steinlight. Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2018. Pp. xi + 278. $55. In New Grub Street (1891), George Gissing describes Edwin Reardon trying desperately to invent “the kind of literary Jack-in-the-box which might excite interest in the mass of readers,” but his consciousness of the scale of the reading public ironically crowds out Reardon’s ideas and leaves him feeling isolated from the literary world, his wife and the population at large (ch. 5). Comparable feelings of alienation in the face of a human “mass” open Populating the Novel, though Emily Steinlight’s examples derive from earlier in the nineteenth century, and from a different genre. The difference between Reardon and his Romantic forebears is that he is also crowded out of the role of protagonist. And this is illustrative of one of Steinlight’s key points: though we tend to think of nineteenth-century novels (particularly those in the High Realist tradition) as being concerned with individuals and their society, in fact the century’s texts are primarily preoccupied with population excess, and so pose unsettling questions about who counts as a character or a political subject. This is not to say that Steinlight denies the existence of protagonists in novels (even though her astute reading of Mary Barton, in particular, does question and problematize this narrative position). Rather, she traces a representational preoccupation with human excess. For example, Steinlight points out that “the protagonists of virtually every Dickens novel enter the world as surplus lives” (12): Oliver Twist is an unwanted parish orphan, Pip’s sister treats him as a burdensome anomaly for not joining his parents and siblings in the graveyard, and so on. More than simply reflecting real demographic increase in the nineteenth century, however, Populating the Novel argues that the crowded pages of texts from the period present how a “population in excess of material conditions” (3) demands new societal and political paradigms. Steinlight suggests that literature was a forum for the negotiation of this new “biopolitical imagination,” which in some measure accounts for the form’s “dual character” in the period as “both mass media and serious art” (10). For, at the same time as novels explore how qualitative and quantitative forms of knowledge can work with or against each other, and could be understood as a means of imagining a [End Page 388] politics of natural life (given that Dickens and other writers were quoted in sociological studies), the production and dissemination of literature is also simultaneously a tangible expression of an expanding and unknowable mass reading public. So, “nineteenth-century literary texts at once presuppose and challenge the principle of population” (12) by “animat[ing] a vast and heterogeneous human aggregate that contractual models of society could no longer govern” (3). Steinlight is not the only critic to have taken population increase as a focus for literary enquiry in recent years. Nicholas Daly’s The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City (2015) similarly examines representational responses to massive demographic growth, though the books are very different in approach and scope. While Daly sees the “demographic imagination” realized in the international circulation of texts, performances and ideas, Steinlight’s focus is chiefly literary and Anglo-centric. Yet while, unlike Daly, Steinlight’s book does not respond to the “global turn” in literary studies in recent years, it is by no means reductive. Populating the Novel takes a broad chronological sweep from the late-eighteenth century to the First World War, and accommodates texts from across “five key genres – Romantic confession, industrial realism, the city novel, sensation fiction, and the naturalist anti-bildungsroman” (28). Each chapter is thoroughly researched, elegantly written, and her close readings of texts are nuanced and convincing. Moreover, her concepts can be usefully applied to cultural materials which fall outside of the remit of this particular book – certainly, I found my mind crowded by supplementary examples as I read Populating the Novel. A counterpart to Steinlight’s careful literary analyses is given in chapter one, in...

Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer by Lykke Guanio-Uluru

Reviewed by: Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer by Lykke Guanio-Uluru Ryan K. Strader Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer, by Lykke Guanio-Uluru. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. In Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer, Lykke Guanio-Uluru's purpose is to evaluate the "formative ethical influence" of best-selling fantasy novels (1). The popularity of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the Twilight series "makes their reflection (or refraction) of cultural values relevant to understanding contemporary Western society"; these are our "best-selling" ethics, and Guanio-Uluru has mined 7,000 pages of text to deliver a rich and sprawling analysis of their ethical arguments (1). Guanio-Uluru draws on James Phelan's rhetorical theory of narrative and ethics to map the "ethical progression" of each series, arguing that the narrative strategies in each text create a discernable "ethical universe" (2). A consistent theme in the analysis is a theoretical conversation between Farah Mendlesohn's argument that there is "an 'unavoidable' link between narrative form and ideology" and Phelan's argument that narrative effects are ethically dynamic, stemming from complex interactions between narrative aesthetics, form, and the reader's ethical positioning (13, 234). Guanio-Uluru questions Mendlesohn's belief in a "rigid" relationship between ethics and rhetorical form; instead, the complexity and depth of Guanio-Uluru's analysis "suggests that individual texts tend to rely on dynamic combinations of formal patterns according to their ethical agenda rather than stay confined to any single and 'static' formal or ideological 'template'" (14). As a result, Guanio-Uluru not only draws on Phelan's work but also acts to validate it and expand its application to works for younger readers. Guanio-Uluru's introductory section on methodology is thorough and useful, foregrounding her use of the contested notion of the "implied author" in the work of Wayne C. Booth and Dan Shen. In connecting the primary texts (the three main series of the authors indicated in the title) to contemporary ethical theory, Plato, Augustine, and Boethius are given some treatment, but the succeeding chapters do not dwell too much on them. The discussion of ethics in the primary texts is concentrated on discovery of how the aesthetic characteristics of the primary text communicate value assessments of right and wrong, good and evil. For each series, Guanio-Uluru focuses on how the narrative presentation influences readers to choose moral sides. This approach of eschewing lengthy discussion of ethical theory does not leave the [End Page 243] ethical discussion feeling unmoored; on the contrary, it keeps Guanio-Uluru's discussion focused on the primary texts, allowing her to dig into the narratives to provide a thorough discussion, undistracted by too-lengthy forays into Plato. The accompanying plot summaries provided by Guanio-Uluru are ample, allowing a reader to compensate if they simply couldn't make it through seven tomes of Harry Potter, but are still curious about the ethical realities of Harry Potter "occulture" (88). Readers who have enjoyed any of the series that Uluru analyzes will feel that they have had a long and satisfying visit back to the worlds of Middle Earth, Hogwarts, and Forks. The analysis of The Lord of the Rings is as sprawling as the Norse mythical traditions that were Tolkien's sources. And fittingly so, as the ethical vision of the implied author is "to amalgamate something of the (heroic) boldness permeating the Norse vision of life with the ideal of compassion and self-sacrifice on which the Christian faith is based" (47). Christian ethical values discussed include Bombadil's value of self-mastery and the collective consequences of individual choice (54, 75). Harry Potter, on the other hand, is presented as a text that utilizes some Christian symbolism and recognizable Christian story arcs, but ultimately the ethical rhetoric of the text rejects the notion of a spiritual reality that imparts morality (156–57). The chapters on The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are engaging, but it is when Guanio-Uluru compares the two series that the analysis shines brightest. While she concludes that the Christian ethical vision of The Lord of...

The Rise and Fall of Carl Schmitt

The Rise and Fall of Carl Schmitt Ian Cook (bio) Carl Schmitt: A Biography Reinhart Mehring Daniel Steuer, trans Polity www.politybooks.com 700 Pages; Print, $45.00 It's hard to account for a biography that, its author acknowledges, is "of such tortuous dimension" and which follows Schmitt's works and their revisions closely, sometimes almost month by month, across much of the 96 years of his life. At over 550 pages of text, the biography "comes close to a chronicle," which "observes and records the sequence of events that made up Schmitt's problematic life, as well as his conscious attempts at finding normative orientation and stability." Summary is also difficult because the book "tells the scandalous story of a 'life lived in the state of exception,' in which the experience of political and personal crises are inextricably linked with one another." So the book analyses Schmitt's works in terms a "complex historical and theoretical context." Mehring deliberately refuses to identify a pattern in these crises and their effects on Schmitt's works, declaring that "we should not hope for a master key to this complex character." Mehring also "seeks to avoid strong judgments and retrospective projections and, instead, to present the open possibilities and contingencies of a life in, as it were, slow motion." One of the crucial question for this "contextualization and historicization of Schmitt" concerns the source of his overt anti-Semitism and support for National Socialism. And this brings us back to questions concerning historicist analysis or, more specifically for me, social historicist analysis itself (see my Reading Mill: Studies in Political Theory [1998]). A hallmark of historicist accounts is that its circumstances constitute objective determinants of a political theory. By way of confirming this effect, its translator, Daniel Steuer, describes this biography as "quasi-positivist." "Schmitt himself looked at his work in its historical context, and he understood it as a response to certain challenges and situations." And historicization tends to validate Schmitt's pointing to external causes for his theoretical positions, as he "would always consider himself to be a collectively—politically or religiously—determined 'participant'" whose "'situation' served as an alibi or excuse." Claiming external determination, as Mehring suggests, allowed Schmitt to create "a strong and beguiling legend of his 'identity with Germany's fate.'" Schmitt wanted to be seen as both "an innocent lamb and a black sheep," indicating a discrepancy between reputation and character, as he did in the case of those authors who served him as intellectual points of reference: Donoso Cortés, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. Schmitt's self-representation might be more persuasive if he offered a structuralist account of human being, and therefore his being and theories, of which Marxism is an exemplar. But, despite some Marxists taking up his work, Schmitt was no Marxist. For him "Marxism cannot come to terms with the realities" and he celebrated the fact that (circa 1970) the "syndrome of German Hegelianism, English economics and French socialism, which makes up the substance of Marxism, is beginning to unravel." Nor, despite his increasing commitment to Catholicism, did Schmitt present himself as being directed by God's will. If anything caused him to be who he was and argue what he argued, it was the German state. It was never the party political state, however, and certainly not the pluralist state. And if he sometimes thought of himself as the servant of the German people, Schmitt's was not a biological conception of "the people." Despite Schmitt's support for Nationalism Socialism and his "'scientification' of Anti-semitism," he eschewed crude racialist notions of das Volk and "did not agree with a radically biological racism, which considered [a human being] . . . solely as an animal." Schmitt's view that individuals were but servants of the state might explain his feeling compelled to support National Socialism. This might have been part of his self-justification and exculpation, however. For, to Mehring, Schmitt was "someone who became implicated in guilt and was later hardly ever able to admit it." Well before he supported National Socialism and Hitler, though, Schmitt "forcefully suggests that the individual only gains significance as a 'civil servant...

Women in Japanese Religions by Barbara Ambros

Reviewed by: Women in Japanese Religions by Barbara Ambros Heather Blair Women in Japanese Religions by Barbara Ambros. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Pp. x + 237. $89.00 cloth, $17.00 paper, e-book available. Women in Japanese Religions provides a chronological survey of women’s participation in Japanese religious culture from the prehistoric Jōmon 縄文 and Yayoi 弥生 periods up through the turn of the twenty-first century. Ambros’s treatment is remarkably balanced: practices and beliefs rooted in local cults, spirit possession, and new religious movements receive consideration equal to that accorded to Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism. At the same time, the book’s historical and thematic breadth, combined with its very manageable length (175 pages of text, plus documentation), means that concision reigns supreme. To Ambros’s great credit, brevity does not entail a sacrifice of complexity. For instance, the chapters consistently alert readers to the diversity of women’s religious lives across regions and social statuses (or what we would today call class), era by era. As Ambros herself notes, the book presents a corrective to master narratives of Japanese religious history—and here the gendered quality of “master” matters. Over the years, we have heard a great deal about Buddhist patriarchs and male nativist intellectuals, for example, but much less about laywomen or priestesses. In this respect, it should be noted that Ambros’s primary agenda is informational and documentary rather than analytical or theoretical. This book aims to identify and describe women’s religious activities, not to reconceptualize them in a radical way or to overturn established historiographical paradigms other than androcentrism. Thus, many of the chapters raise predictable topics: Himiko 卑弥呼, Izanami 伊奘諾・伊弉冉・伊邪那美, and Amaterasu 天照, in the chapters on prehistory and ancient myth; the Lotus Sutra in the Heian period; Tenrikyō 天理教 in the Edo and Meiji [End Page 201] periods. This focus on established themes works well, not least because it provides a recognizable counterpoint to other introductory surveys. Significantly, however, there are also points where Ambros conveys information that has not been widely circulated in the English-language literature. For instance, I experienced an aha moment while reading the discussion of the government’s purposeful and systematic exclusion of women from the Shinto priesthood during the Meiji period. I had honestly not known that women had been legally barred from holding the office of shrine priest (p. 126). This kind of attention to significant detail means that Ambros’s work holds interest not only to neophytes but also to those of us who would like to consider ourselves experts. Like her combination of general survey with telling detail, Ambros’s decision to extend the discussion up through the turn of the twenty-first century shapes the tenor of the book in salutary ways. It ensures that we attend to anthropological and sociological as well as historical and archaeological sources. It frustrates, or at the very least complicates, any urge the reader might have to locate authentic religiosity at some point in the past. In highlighting the comparative novelty of practices that have now become conventional (for example, the Shinto wedding ceremony), it also problematizes essentialist views of religion as unchanging “tradition.” Finally, the chapters on the postwar period and millennial “lost decades” clearly track shifts in the ways that Japanese conceptualize and describe their own activities, for example by noting the rise of talk of “spirituality” (supirichuarutei スピリチュアリティ) and “the spiritual world” (seishin sekai 精神世界). In combination with the volume’s historical reliability, balanced approach, and focus on women, the accessibility of Women in Japanese Religions makes the book important, useful, and unique. Students will appreciate Ambros’s straightforward, readable style, and instructors will be happy to have the list of twenty-one discussion questions following the main text. Paired with primary sources and case studies, the book would work well as a core text for a course in Japanese religions. It would also be suitable for courses on gender in Japan or East Asia, or on comparative women’s history. Despite this broad appeal, instructors should be aware that the content sometimes belies the book’s introductory tone. The challenge here is most apparent in what I think of as the “first-use issue...

Dardanelle and the Bottoms: Environment, Agriculture, and Economy in an Arkansas River Community, 1819–1970 by Mildred Diane Gleason

Reviewed by: Dardanelle and the Bottoms: Environment, Agriculture, and Economy in an Arkansas River Community, 1819–1970 by Mildred Diane Gleason J. Blake Perkins Dardanelle and the Bottoms: Environment, Agriculture, and Economy in an Arkansas River Community, 1819–1970. By Mildred Diane Gleason. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2017. Pp. [viii], 440. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-68226-038-8; cloth, $69.95, ISBN 978-1-68226-032-6.) Mildred Diane Gleason charts the evolution of her native Dardanelle, a town about eighty miles northwest of Little Rock, and its outlying "bottoms" in the Arkansas River Valley. Southern historians will find mostly familiar themes of agricultural and social change, but Gleason makes valuable contributions with local anecdotes. At times, details on a wide range of topics—tucked into more than 340 pages of text—overwhelm the book's focus on how the cotton economy forged a "reciprocal bond between the Bottoms and the town, which had sustained [End Page 982] and enriched both—and ultimately served as their mutual reason for existence," until "modernity" left the area in a state of decline by the 1970s (p. 340). Gleason begins with a chapter that relies mostly on secondary sources about the area's early settlement, the development of the cotton frontier and slavery, and its experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction. She quickly moves on to examine the "reestablishment" of Dardanelle and its hinterlands from the 1880s to 1910; from this point on, the Dardanelle newspaper becomes her main primary source. Gleason argues that the area "was not a true New South model" because it lacked industrialization (p. 85). Instead, the continuity of cotton's hegemony produced the "reciprocal nature" between farmers in the Bottoms and businessmen in Dardanelle that sustained the community into the 1960s (p. 85). By the 1910s, agricultural productivity, population growth, and business prospects in town "appeared poised for continued development" (p. 88). This period was marked by the tragedies of racism and glaring social and economic inequality typical of the broader South, but Gleason contends that the symbiotic relationship between Dardanelle and the Bottoms thrived. The collapse of cotton prices after World War I brought troubles to farmers and businessmen alike. Boll weevils and floods compounded the misery. Severe flooding ravaged the area until the federal government completed the Dardanelle Dam in 1966. Gleason emphasizes how the interdependence of town and countryside helped ease suffering and maintain hope through these difficulties, though she notes that amid such uncertainties many people also turned to "a reactionary reliance on . . . traditional conservative religion, politics, race, and gender relationships" (p. 224). The Great Depression spelled even harder times and brought about even more change. After World War II, federal farm policies, labor shortages, and mechanization transformed agriculture and pummeled the "rural/town reciprocity" (p. 345). Despite efforts to adapt, the gradual extinction of cotton precipitated a major population exodus, the deterioration of local businesses, "and a decline in Dardanelle's importance as an Arkansas community" (p. 288). Since the 1970s, "'old Dardanelle' and all that it entailed no longer exist," writes Gleason (p. 345). Although Gleason is too good a historian to allow plain nostalgia to cloud her work, the book's reciprocity thesis and tone do, at times, put off a "Mayberry"-like impression. The emphasis on interdependence and mutuality hinges mostly on Dardanelle newspaper accounts; like most local papers, the town's paper was prone to boosterism and had a vested interest in minimizing local conflict. For example, on relations between Bottoms farmers and Dardanelle merchants in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Gleason too easily glides over deep divisions and competing interests that might have surfaced more from a look at local mortgage records and court cases. Moreover, outside forces like broader societal norms, distant markets, and the federal government are also typical culprits for community problems such as ugly race relations, economic unevenness and exploitation, and the area's eventual decline, while locals may bear less responsibility. Finally, while the book is already too long, this reviewer wanted to know more about Dardanelle's transformation since the 1970s, such as changes in population and political economy. What about politics? This is, after all, the...

Nicholas Rockwell. Thebes: A History

This short overview of the history of Thebes between 1600 BC and AD 476 is part of the Routledge Cities of the Ancient World series, at present a scattergun collection of studies with Elis the only other mainland Greek community published to date. It is markedly shorter than other books in the series (149 pages of text compared to 239 pages for Elis), and the claims of the book to give an up to date assessment of all available information for the city over two millennia are very difficult to meet in this length.

Meaning and Mortality in Kierkegaard and Heidegger: Origins of the Existential Philosophy of Death by Adam Buben

Reviewed by: Meaning and Mortality in Kierkegaard and Heidegger: Origins of the Existential Philosophy of Death by Adam Buben Susan-Judith Hoffmann Adam Buben. Meaning and Mortality in Kierkegaard and Heidegger: Origins of the Existential Philosophy of Death. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 189. Paper, $34.95. Buben undertakes the ambitious project of providing "a compelling framework for understanding the ways in which philosophy has discussed death" (3). This is a tall order for 136 pages of text, all the more so since he argues that the thinkers of western philosophy before Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's innovative existential philosophy of death can be broadly categorized into a Platonic strain, and an Epicurean strain. The Platonic strain suggests that death should not be feared, as the soul will survive the death of the body. Thinkers such as the Apostle Paul, Plotinus, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, and Pascal are briefly discussed as examples. Membership in the Epicurean strain is marked by the conviction that the particles of the soul disperse at death and leave no subject in any form that might experience evil or salvation. Since there is no "meaningful postmortem" (23) experience, concerns with death are rendered irrelevant in life. The Epicurean strain of thought, Buben argues, was appropriated by the Stoics, Montaigne, Spinoza, [End Page 181] Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and even Hegel, all of whom are critical of the Platonic recommendation of "dying to" the world (11) to focus on an afterlife that finds its heyday in Christian thought. Buben admits that it is difficult to situate Hegel in this Platonic/Epicurean dichotomy. Ultimately, Buben reads Hegel as arguing that human beings can find divinity in their mortal selves and not in some future heavenly realm. Buben briefly discusses a few other notable exceptions to the Platonic/Epicurean framework, namely analytic philosophers Thomas Nagel and George Pitcher. Given that they argue that one need not experience harm for harm to be done, they do not fit comfortably into the Epicurean framework. The two strains are uniquely merged in Kierkegaard and Heidegger, resulting in an existential account of death, in which, contra Epicurus, death and the I coexist, and contra Plato, life must not be a "dying to the world" in preparation for an eternal afterlife. According to Buben's reading, Kierkegaard is at odds with the Epicurean strain because Kierkegaard is concerned with the theme of death in life in ever-increasing intensity throughout his corpus. Moreover, Kierkegaard is highly critical of the Platonic/Christian strain that attempts to offer individuals worldly comfort by mitigating the fear of death with hope for an afterlife. Buben offers an interesting account of Kierkegaard and his relationship to Christianity; and he provides ample references to Kierkegaard's texts. He also includes a thorough and valuable discussion of Kierkegaard scholarship, as well as an interesting engagement with Hegel's thought on Christianity. One drawback to this section of the book is that Buben does not sufficiently distinguish between the individual Socrates's and Plato's doctrines. Buben argues that Kierkegaard is critical of Plato's "dying away from the world"; however, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard emphatically praises Socrates for being an authentic individual who held fast to uncertainty and was therefore a truly subjective thinker. In the chapter on death in Being and Time, Buben promises to clarify, by means of a careful explication, "the most controversial and difficult in the history of philosophy's dealings with the topic" (92) and to argue that the role that death plays in the "care" structure of Dasein constitutes an important "response" to Epicurus. In the first part of the chapter, Buben gives a detailed analysis of the death chapter. He concludes, along with Heidegger, that Dasein released from the illusions of the "they" and inauthentic ways of understanding death as demise, inter alia, will enjoy a robust freedom to be what it really is. The last part of the book offers an interesting discussion of the unacknowledged debt that Heidegger owes to Kierkegaard's thought and underscores the similarity in their projects. The heart of their kinship lies in "the combination of maintaining a sense of dying to the world while...

DEMOCRATIC VISTAS

After a generation of grand stories about the rise of modern republican thought (the so-called “republican-synthesis” school epitomized by the works of Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock), James Kloppenberg's new book, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, offers a history of democratic thought: what Kloppenberg calls “the idea of self-government.” In the course of nearly a thousand pages of text and notes, Kloppenberg traces democracy's emergence “as a widely shared, albeit still controversial, model of government” over the last four centuries in the North Atlantic world (1). The book is deeply learned and intellectually capacious, covering thinkers from the ancient Greeks, through the sixteenth-century wars of religion, through the American and French Revolutions, ending abruptly at the Civil War. Few intellectual historians writing today could have managed a book of such sweep. The number of authors, texts, and themes discussed is vast—so much so that at times it seems that the book could double as a history of thought in the West.

THE COMMITMENTS OF DEMOCRACY

It underplays the significance of James Kloppenberg's monumentally ambitious and massively learned Toward Democracy to call it a big book—though at seven hundred pages of text, a hundred pages of notes and another five hundred pages of additional endnotes online it is surely that. It is, in voice and subject, several books in one. The first is a sweeping narrative account of the struggles for self-rule in England, the United States, and France from the seventeenth century through the middle third of the nineteenth century. The great revolutions stand at this history's center—the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s, the British North Americans’ revolt against monarchy and their construction of an enduring kingless polity in the 1770s and 1780s, and the revolutionary upheaval in France in the years after 1789—their origins, struggles, and dramas etched with a skilled narrative historian's hand.

A LONG DESIRED SELF-LEARNING SYSTEM TO AID BIG DATA BUSINESS SOCIAL MEDIA CONSUMPTION

ABSTRACT Organizations have developed Big Data capabilities to process enormous amounts of data – Petabytes and such. It is the lower end of the Volume-spectrum of Big Data that has not found enough easy to use, low infrastructure solutions that may require little learning yet may offer real time interaction possibilities and human friendly visualization. Typical media consumers such as airlines flyers have lagged in consumption of information, because Big Data business so far has failed to even acknowledge that the social media data average flyers can often have to deal with, has similar Big Data challenges. This experiment based research establishes and demonstrates a context-aware approach that can help flyers self-learn from blogs and their own social media data. It show-cases InContext, an in-browser Social Media data processor that has been tested with nearly 42,000 customer reviews expressed as nearly 0.5 million lines of text equivalent to nearly 17,500 A4 sized pages of text. InContext uses light-weight technologies for processing enormous amounts of Social Media data and carries out considerable Big Data tasks, real-time in an interactive manner without requiring the use of any (1) external dictionaries, (2) SQL or NoSQL like querying, and (3) libraries. InContext enables: (1) exploration of text data (2) keyword and phrase matching (3) data partitioning (4) data reduction (5) extraction of entities and dictionaries (6) extraction of relationships between entities (7) extraction of specific information in-context, say regarding food and drinks, in-flight entertainment or seating comfort and (8) comparison of flyer reviews with that specificity. This work has potential for significant impact on business. Especially the high usability and low resource requirements of InContext have implications for design of comparative apps by business. Also, by enabling flyers to consume more information – this work proposes to alleviate information load – thus increasing the availability of flyers to even more information from business. This work is novel, and we are not aware of any literature that addresses this issue. Keywords self-learning, context-aware, Big Data, ease of use, interactive, text visualization

China’s Future

David Shambaugh’s clearly organized and engagingly written volume accomplishes two important tasks. First, it fills a significant gap in the literature for general readers in foreign and public affairs by providing a cogent (172 pages of text plus notes) yet comprehensive overview of recent developments in China’s economy, society, politics and foreign affairs that identifies and assesses the key elements determining China’s future importance. Second, it allows this leading international China specialist to fully explain his views on how and why China is likely to develop in the future. Very few China specialists have the depth and breadth of experience to successfully write such a volume. The book builds on Shambaugh’s four decades of scholarly engagement with China as leader of various international collaborations and publications, journal editor, and author of major books dealing with the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese military, and Chinese foreign relations. It coincides with the publication of the 550-page multidimensional guide to contemporary China, The China Reader: Rising Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), which he edited.