Enlightenment Principles Research Articles

Visions of an Unseen World Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England by Sasha Handley

93 opean owners gives way to a careful appeasement of those owners’ concerns that evangelism among their slaves would lead to their freedom. As practiced in Caribbean colonies and the southern US, Anglican theology comes to argue that conversion makes the slaves’ souls equal to their masters’ while their persons must remain enslaved : slavery is justified as an opportunity for conversion to Christianity. Despite some uneasiness about slavery itself voiced by some Anglicans as early as the 1740s, the church largely continued to preach a policy of amelioration of the slaves’ condition—not abolition —and considered that the slaves themselves ‘‘lacked an ethical awareness ’’ even while the Anglican Church’s plantation possessions failed to become models of benevolent Christian rule. Mr. Strong logically, if implicitly, concludes that missionary experience in the New World shaped imperial practice and moved Anglican theology away from the Enlightenment principles with which it began. Shannon Hartling University of Waterloo SASHA HANDLEY. Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England. London : Pickering & Chatto, 2007. Pp. ix ⫹ 287. £60; $99. Like Rabelais’s ‘‘Lantern’’ guiding we mere faggots ‘‘with legs of wood,’’ Ms. Handley lights the reader’s way through a maze of ghost stories from the Restoration to the year 1750. Methodically and painstakingly, she examines their evolution from a predominant oral tradition to print formats, concluding that ‘‘ghost stories’’ were the collective expression of beliefs and practices in Georgian England. Whereas she could have investigated ways in which her eighteenth-century ‘‘hierarchy of the supernatural’’ had been modeled after earlier celestial hierarchies—a welldeveloped topic—Ms. Handley observes simply that this ‘‘strictly ordered hierarchy . . . emerged by the close of the eighteenth century.’’ She appropriates the ‘‘supernatural’’ vocabulary of the era, clothing her ghosts, specters, and souls in such terms as ‘‘preternatural’’ and ‘‘apparition.’’ In Chapter 1, tantalizingly entitled ‘‘Restoration Hauntings,’’ Ms. Handley continues to employ mystifying wordimages such as ‘‘spirit world,’’ ‘‘wishes of the dead,’’ ‘‘the wandering dead,’’ ‘‘a guiding spiritual light within,’’ ‘‘visions of the dead,’’ and ‘‘ghostly appearances .’’ Readers of the Scriblerian might have an ear for the aura of mystery surrounding eighteenth-century esoteric studies. Ms. Handley’s terminology certainly captures it. Chapter 1 investigates the Restoration ’s radical reaction to Calvinist psychological torment. Theologian Henry More, a Calvinist by upbringing, ‘‘was plagued by fears of damnation as a young boy.’’ In the Calvinist scheme of salvation, the doctrine of double predestination mandated that no good works or faith could change the fate God had ordained for the individual, resulting in severe emotional anxiety. Fierce antiCalvinist controversies over the nature of life after death fueled promotion of ghost stories by Anglican clergy, polemicists , and natural philosophers. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, Ms. Handley details popular culture’s truck with ghosts in socially stratified forms of print, some more fashionable or acceptable in polite company, and clothes her 94 arguments of the permeability between spoken and written ghost stories in plausible garb. Virtually every form of written and enacted production was employed during the eighteenth century for distributing ghost stories. Ms. Handley discusses, for example, ballads, chapbooks , almanacs, jestbooks, rumor and gossip, oral and musical performance, theatrical enactments, letters, interactive periodicals, essay periodicals, and general magazines. Written ghost stories, clothed in dialogue , image, and circumstantial detail dramatized not only real events, but also the emotions and interior worlds of people —much like ourselves I point out— both skeptical of and intensely curious about the existence of their own souls after death. Ms. Handley attributes the shift in ghost imagery—evolving from the more concrete winding-sheet, faggot -bearing ghosts into the more poetic, ethereal visions—to technological advances in the sciences of optics and astronomy , whereby people could see within and beyond what had before been impermeable. Given that currentday readers will hang expectantly on each of her wordily retold stories, their expectancy of visual rewards that illustrate or portray these ‘‘visions’’ is left as unfinished business, since the stories are accompanied by a mere four illustrations . Nonetheless, Ms. Handley convinces us that Georgian England is the time and place when marvelous ghost stories happened and were told, stories worthy of studying and rereading. Kathryn LaFevers...

Competing Masculinities: Fraternities, Gender and Nationality in the German Confederation, 1815–30

Immediately after the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon (1815), university students, particularly the nationalist fraternity, the Burschenschaft, sought to connect the German nation with martial values. They practised gymnastics, duelled and commemorated veterans of the Napoleonic wars. The era after the Wars also illustrates greater mediation in the discourse of masculinity than has generally been acknowledged, however. University students never achieved consensus on what masculine identity or German identity entailed. By applying enlightened principles to notions of honour and the practice of the duel, Burschenschafter also articulated a new, more moral vision of the German man, one based more on rationality and self‐discipline than on martial values.

A Loaf and A Half

Page 33 March–April 2008 Taylor continued from previous page Enlightenment principles, particularly not empiricism . In fact, the opposite is true—empirical principles are founded on the enshrinement of doubt. One would think that, if anything, the valuation of direct experience and individual judgment over entrenched authority would fit right into Duncombe’s advocacy of an open and participatory political activism. It would seem instead that Duncombe’s beef is not with empiricism per se but with scientism, which abuses are indeed rampant. Not that you’ll see such distinctions made here. This kind of ahistorical misrepresentation and breezy dismissal of Western intellectual history is rife throughout Dream, and the misapprehensions behind this stance are responsible for most of the book’s weaker arguments. Duncombe, in fact, spends little time supporting his thesis that liberals have lost ground as a result of trying to be too reasonable in their opposition to a “shock-and-awe” right-wing. Perhaps this is because the concept doesn’t survive examination. To accept this narrative, one must believe that the decades-old stereotype of the “bleeding-heart liberal” never existed, and that “Hollywood liberal” is a term of affection rather than disdain. The fact that the modern conservative movement, from William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater, through to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and even Newt Gingrich, gained ascendancy by selling themselves as defenders of Enlightenment principles—however disingenuous their claims truly were—would seem to suggest that the concept, far from being outdated, has great resonance with the mainstream. Consider, for instance, George W. Bush’s early campaign advocacy of “strict constitutionalism” as a criteria in the selection of Court Justices; this was a defense of precisely the kind of drab, cool reasoning that Duncombe accuses the Democrats of using to their own detriment. Have not liberals for decades been, instead,the“barbariansatthegate”intheconservative narrative? On what basis does Duncombe assert that Paris Hilton and celebrity gossip resonate with a majority of Americans? All of these suppositions remain unexamined in Dream, which reads as if its author saw no distinction between the products consumed and the people who consume them. His approach is almost archeological—“the people” are studied through their artifacts. While an entire chapter is devoted to a sociopolitical analysis of the video game Grand Theft Auto, the voice of the demos outside of the author’s own urban, activist milieu barely makes an appearance. In the end, one comes away from Dream with a genuine sense of possibility, tainted with a heavy dose of skepticism. That progressives need to rediscover the language with which to address the popular “dream” is a position hard with which to find fault. But in the journey from the abstract to the specific, my fear is that Duncombe takes things in entirely the wrong direction. The theatrical activism that he advocates, while bracingly effective in certain settings, has also arguably discredited the Left in the eyes of the mainstream. In an era in which the public, Left and Right, is clearly hungry for both recognition and an empowering comprehension of the world around them, one might reasonably hope for something nobler than more effective advertising and “happenings.” Is it not possible that the rapid expansion of Internet activism—which compliments its idealism with factual and analytical discourse—is a sign that Enlightenment principles are ready for a comeback? Might not the Internet, oddly absent from Duncombe’s discussion, have the potential to democratize the Enlightenment as has never been done before? Now that would be a dream come true. Andrew S. Taylor is the associate editor of the online literary magazine Menda City Review. His short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in numerous publications. Skinner continued on next page A Loaf and a Half José Skinner The Savage Detectives Roberto Bolaño Translated by Natasha Wimmer Farrar, Straus and Giroux http://www.fsgbooks.com 592 pages; cloth, $27.00 The inside flap of the hardcover edition of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives quotes an anonymous reviewer from the Spanish newspaper El País: “[Bolaño’s book is] the kind of novel Borges would have written….” This is silly on the face...

Participating in a Collaborative Action Learning Set (CAL): beginning the journey

Action learning is being increasingly utilised as a strategy to underpin practitioner focused development and research projects in healthcare generally and nursing in particular. Whilst facilitators of and participants in action learning have a variety of resource materials to guide their practice and participation, there continue to be few systematic and/or evaluative accounts of the experience of participating in action learning for potential action learning participants to draw upon. This paper attempts to address this agenda. The paper presents an interpretive evaluation of the experience of nurses participating in action learning as the learning strategy underpinning a 3-year emancipatory practice development/practitioner research programme. In particular, the paper focuses on the experience of ‘joining a learning set’. This focus has been adopted as the theory of action learning emphasises the principle of ‘voluntariness’, but yet action learning is increasingly being pre-prescribed as a component of development and research programmes. Such was the case with the programme reported on in this paper. The paper describes an approach used to evaluate learning that was adopted in this programme and in particular the initial evaluation stage that focuses on participants' feelings about joining an action learning set. The data collection and analysis processes are described and the key themes arising from the analysis (‘self-preservation’ versus ‘development of self’) discussed. It is concluded that working with principles of enlightenment is essential to successful action learning and the transformation of workplace cultures.

<i>Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France Christine Clark-Evans Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. By Lynn Festa. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. viii + 300 pp. $55.00. Professor Festa’s history of sentimentality follows the confluence of two psychological and cultural phenomena in the eighteenth-century British and French literary imagination: “the sentimental mode,” or depictions of sentiment as a defining human quality and capacity, and the drive toward colonial and imperial rule in matters of nation, gender, family, class, and race. This comparative cultural history, an examination that is equally balanced between Britain and France, makes a very coherent argument for critical research that focuses on the person—the emerging concepts of the self, of who has feelings and the medical and moral capacity and right to feel, and how they relate to “the literary mode of empire.” The focus here is mainly on how sentiments intersect with and contradict the brutal and bloody practices that are a part of colonizing and exploiting peoples in other societies and cultures. It is then argued that the sentimental depictions of colonial enterprises allowed the readers to selectively recognize the humanity and suffering of non-European people and still keep European “distinctive cultural and personal identities.” The result is defined as a refashioning of “conquest into commerce” and “scenes of violence and exploitation into occasions for benevolence and pity” (2). The central conclusion is that “sentimentality” is a necessary result of these psychological and moral contradictions in the eighteenth-century novel with Enlightenment principles and ideals, producing unavoidable consequences. As such “empire begets sentimentality” (7). In five chapters, sentimentality is treated as the result of the encounter between the newly formed concepts of the self and the other in British and French literature. The first chapter separates “sentimental feeling” in the eighteenth century from earlier ideas about human psychology and culture. The next four chapters examine the representation of the internal life of Europeans and the figures and tropes presented in texts, primarily novels, representing in the external world those who are psychologically and culturally distinct and are most often inferior categories of peoples in far away continents. The introduction is short but cogent and defines “The Great World Without” and the spatial topology of the outside versus inside worlds in the sentimental novel. The first chapter shows what is new in the 1760s and 1770s about sentiment and sentimentality by triangulating in Foucauldian genealogy what would become foundational terms at the time––sympathy, sentimental, and sensibility––along the lines of Northrop Frye, Anne Vila, [End Page 412] Ann Jessie Van Sant, and G. S. Rousseau. The meanings of these three terms are described according to Hume and Smith on the British side and Rousseau, Locke, Diderot, and Montesquieu on the French side. The chapter ends with a description of the “sentimental rewriting” of eighteenth-century empire by virtue of the process in which “sentimental feeling consolidates individual and collective identities” (55). The second chapter explains how sentimentality permits the society to succumb to commoditization that inspires feelings, even love, for objects and reveals the social effects of market forces on exchanged goods and people, the colonized and exploited other, to the point that some objects acquire very special “personal and collective identities” (68). Referring to the 1768 book A Sentimental Journey, “Sterne’s Snuffbox” in the next chapter title is the principal case in point of a “sentimental commodity” (69) among figures of speech and tropes of things that inspire the reader’s feeling. These literary objects are said not only to feel themselves but also to speak in “objective narratives,” based here on Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism and social relations in which commodities are selectively attributed feeling and, in certain texts, speech, called the “Commodity’s Soliloquy” (115). Chapter 4, “Making Humans Human,” the longest and most convincing chapter, explains the process of attributing human qualities and value to sentimental figures in commerce, in images, and particularly in printed texts. The analysis of sentimental figures in this chapter places moral emphasis on the relationship between price and person for African slaves. Such sentimental tropes show the...

‘Aufklärung und kein Ende’: The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought1

ABSTRACTThe following article traces the development of Friedrich Nietzsche's attitude to Enlightenment and challenges the view that he can be dismissed, or revered, as an anti‐Enlightenment irrationalist. While Nietzsche rejects certain elements of Enlightenment thought, particularly those which found expression in the tenets of the French Revolution, his philosophical diagnoses are informed to an extent by the critical principles of Enlightenment. Nietzsche admires the critical spirit of certain figures associated with eighteenth‐century Enlightenment, notably Voltaire and Lessing, as well as representatives of earlier ‘Enlightenments’, such as Epicurus, Petrarch and Erasmus. He is also impressed by the audacity of the Enlightenment project, however flawed parts of it may be, and by the scale of its philosophical legacy. However, Nietzsche's approach to Enlightenment remains ambivalent and selective. His sceptical diagnoses of the phenomenon anticipate Horkheimer and Adorno's critique in Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947). The article concludes that it is, paradoxically, Nietzsche's attempts to suggest ways forward for humanity that present the most significant obstacles to viewing him as an enlightened thinker.

Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (review)

Reviewed by: Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment Jane G. Landers (bio) Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment. By David J. Weber. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. xvii, 466. Cloth, $35.00, Paper, $20.00.) In 1992, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas, David J. Weber published The Spanish Frontier in North America, the first borderland study to successfully integrate the histories of Spain's colonial southeastern and southwestern frontiers in North America. In his sweeping new work, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment, Weber now compares frontiers across the Americas, focusing on the "independent Indians" on the fringes of empire whom the Spaniards failed to conquer and whom they designated as bárbaros or savages. Weber's temporal focus is the eighteenth century, when Bourbon rulers of Spain employing Enlightenment principles sought to reorganize and modernize the empire. Among their primary goals were to make administration more efficient and profits greater. Inspired by his English and French competitors, the most notable Bourbon, Carlos III (1759–1788), commissioned scientific expeditions such as that of Alejandro Malaspina to assess the state of the empire and its vast unknown frontiers. Malaspina took particular interest in the indigenous groups he encountered in regions as distinct as southern South America and the northwest coast of North America, describing them as "noble" savages, capable of improving and developing if treated kindly. Drawing on evidence from expeditions such as Malaspina's, as well as from local administrators, clerics, and military officials, the Bourbons recognized a critical need to "civilize" the natives living on unstable Spanish frontiers. Made into "new men," they could be incorporated into the Spanish body politic. Weber is careful not to assign total power to the Spaniards on those frontiers, and he repeatedly illustrates how local circumstances and local politics shaped Indian agency. He devotes considerable attention to the most successfully independent Araucanians of Chile ("Wild Men Extraordinary"). Their dense populations and dispersed social organization, their nomadic hunting-and-gathering lifestyles, in addition to their rapid adaptation to guns and horses, allowed the Araucanians to keep the Spaniards from their homelands south of the Biobío River well into the nineteenth century. Eventually crossing the Andes eastward into Argentina, [End Page 560] they "Araucanianized" the Pampas and Patagonian cultures, and the blended groups became noted for their success in stock raising and for raiding isolated Spanish estancias. Over long contact, Weber argues that the Spaniards living on those remote ranches of Argentina, and others whom the raiders captured, also became "Araucanianized." Access to and mastery of horses also allowed other groups to hold off Spanish domination, notably the Indians of the Chaco, Paraguay, and Upper Peru (Bolivia) in South America, and the Apaches and Comanches of North America's southwestern deserts. But in Latin America, as in Africa, the introduction of guns and horses increased the levels and frequency of violence on the frontiers. Permanent war became a way of life, as Indians fought one another and the Spanish, making and breaking alliances often. War "justified" enslaving defeated enemies, and the profits from slave trading encouraged more war, as it had in Africa, and as it did in North America, as well. The high costs of permanent war drove the Crown to seek alternative means of "reducing" Indians. To analyze shifts in Bourbon Indian policy, Weber looks back to the Hapsburgs, who over their centuries-long rule repeatedly returned to the question of the nature of the new people they had encountered in the Americas and how best to treat them. Caught in the dilemma of trying to protect and at the same time exploit their new "subjects," the Hapsburgs developed a voluminous code of paternalistic legislation that, although unevenly enforced, set Spain apart from later European colonizers. So too did the Spaniards' tendency to include Indians in their new societies, rapidly producing a large mestizo population throughout the Americas, unequalled in English and French colonies where Indians were largely excluded. The Hapsburgs relied heavily on the missionary orders to convert and "reduce" hostile natives. Influenced by Enlightenment rationality...

Slavery, human dignity and human rights

Slavery continues to be practiced in many parts of the world: not only chattel slavery but also indirect varieties (enforced child labour, prostitution, debt enslavement, etc.). Secular organisations opposed to these practices seek to provide a suitable philosophical counter to those supporting or tolerating the evils. The present paper considers natural law and neo-Kantian arguments and finds them wanting. It then looks at biblical principles and the history of the abolition of the slave trade in England and the emancipation movement in the United States (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). From this ideological and historical survey, an attempt is made to discover why Enlightenment principles, as exemplified by the French philosophes, Thomas Jefferson, and other Revolutionaries, failed to impact, whilst evangelical Christians (Granville Sharp, John Newton, Wilberforce, et al.) succeeded in their hard-won crusade to outlaw slavery. By way of conclusion, a parallel is drawn with the contemporary right-to-life movement and jurisprudent Ronald Dworkin’s position on abortion.

Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic

Leon Sachs University of Kentucky Guiney, M. Martin. Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. 288. As he explains in the preface, M. Martin Guiney's study of the teaching of literature under France's Third Republic is motivated by a desire to understand what he sees as a paradox at the core of the republican school, namely, the institution's "persistent authoritarian character" that exists alongside its emphasis on autonomous rational thinking. Guiney locates the origins of this contradiction in what he describes as the deceptive educational policies and practices of the early Third Republic. He argues that republican leaders and education reformers, while appearing to uphold Enlightenment principles and fulfill the aspirations of the revolutionaries of the First Republic, were simultaneously implementing a pedagogical program modeled in large part on the practices of ancien régime institutions, in particular those of the Catholic Church. To put it another way, while claiming to implement a modern, democratic educational system that granted autonomy to the individual student, republican leaders were actually perpetuating a "top-down, dogmatic transmission of values" (207) more characteristic of the institutions that the Republic sought to displace. Guiney thus presents late nineteenth-century republican education reform not as a true break with the past (as defenders of the myth would have it) but rather as "continuity disguised as change" (xii). Privileging literary studies in both primary and secondary education as the site for observing this republican stratagem, Guiney analyzes school manuals (e.g., G. Bruno's Le tour de la France par deux enfants), textbooks, syllabi, and many of the classic reference works of the period (such as Gabriel Compayré's history of educational doctrines or the monumental Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d'instruction primaire edited by Ferdinand Buisson) to make his case. This study belongs to a growing body of scholarly reassessments of the history and legacy of republican education. While others have studied the fundamental conservatism of both Jules Ferry's school reform1 and literary studies in fin-de-siècle France,2 the originality of Guiney's contribution lies in the analogy he establishes between Catholic notions of "sacredness" with respect to Scripture and the idea of "literariness," a term Guiney uses to describe the "sacred" status of literature in republican education. In contradistinction to the Russian Formalists' use of the term to define "scientifically" the object of literary study, literariness for Guiney refers instead to that quality of literature that eludes precise definition and which, like the "sacred," "resists empirical [End Page 135] analysis" (206). Guiney shows how this "sacred aura of literature" was exploited by republican educators in their effort to fashion a coherent national culture that would buttress the French national identity still healing from the turbulence of 1870-71. Leaders of the Third Republic faced a problem that had already emerged under the First Republic: how to spread literacy for the purpose of creating a democratic citizenry, without exposing the people to the dangers of literature, an elitist, aristocratic art form marked by rhetorical vacuity, obfuscation and abstraction. It was far preferable to discover truth through the direct study of concrete things and to communicate it in a transparent – i.e., non-literary – language. In short, the problem with literature was that it did not "heed the call to reason" (38). The Third Republic's educators solved this problem, says Guiney, by misrepresenting the literary tradition and limiting students' opportunities to interpret literary texts. For example, with respect to formulating the national canon, Guiney observes that only those works would be "consecrated" that could be shown to illustrate the qualities or principles that the Republic wanted to promote. Thus, the predominance of seventeenth-century literature in the canon is explained by the fact that such works exhibited the qualities of reason and restraint, while avoiding those of irrational genius and inspiration, which the conservative Third Republic, eager to separate itself from the radical Jacobin legacy, sought...

The theories on infant pedagogy of Dr. Timothy Corcoran, professor of education, university college, Dublin

This paper considers the theories of language educaation and infant pedagogy of Professor Timothy Corcoran, Professor of Education in University College, Dublin. He played a pivotal role in the debates on education at the 1920s. These opinions were to become decisive in the formation of the New Free State's education programmes and policies. He held that infant classes ought to be the prime agents in the revival of the Irish Language. As a result the National Programme of Primary Instruction (1922) required that all the work in the infant classes should be conducted through Irish. He castigated the enlightened principles of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel and Montessori arguing that Irish education should not give up its sane traditions for doctrines derived from ‘poisoned sources’. His antagonism towards the thinking of the progressive educational theorists meant that the infants of Ireland had to wait until 1948 for a revised programme that would be more in line with the thinking of the day.

Romps with Ransom’s King: Fans, Collectors, Academics, and the M. P. Shiel Archives

HOUSING THE ARCHIVES OF SUCH NOTABLE LITERARY FIGURES as Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, and Oscar Wilde, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas is a Mecca for academic researchers from all over the world. At the same time, it is a Mecca for a very different kind of researcher attracted to a very different kind of archive. Take Alex, for example, a self-professed goth who describes his pilgrimage to the Ransom Center to view the Aleister Crowley archives in his blog, Alex's Journal. (1) Among his other interests cited on the user info page, Alex lists death metal, body piercing, drinking, comics hurting peoples brains [sic], debauchery, subdural haematomas, and weirding out weird people. The sheer eccentricity of the Ransom's collections--which include high literary, mass cultural, and even counter-cultural material--make it a place where a professor earnestly poring over a Joyce manuscript might rub shoulders with a like Alex who describes his research on Crowley as having fun and taking some cool notes. In other words, it is a place where the academic and the come face to face. The essay that follows discusses this confrontation between the academic and the in the archive--not in a literal way--but through the story of the archive of M. P. Shiel, an obscure writer of mystery, detective, horror, science fiction and other popular genres. His archives at the Ransom Center owe their existence entirely to a select few fans of Shiel--namely, a drunken bibliophile and a right-wing millionaire plastics manufacturer--figures who, like Alex, present a stark contrast to the earnest academics we normally associate with archives. In telling the story of this archive, the essay considers the differing discourses of the academic and the and how these discourses come into conflict when fans become implicated with archives, when fans engage in scholarship, and when the academic confronts the inside him- or herself. At the same time, it reveals how the Ransom Center became the kind of eclectic research institution that would consider creating archives devoted not only to renowned literary and cultural figures, but also to popular and mass cultural figures, from the more enduring and notorious of these--such as Crowley--to the most obscure and forgotten--such as Shiel. Academic, Fan, and Collector Discourse One of the reasons the image of the earnest Joyce scholar rubbing shoulders with the goth of Crowley in the Ransom Center is so amusing is that implicitly we recognize the stark contrast between the ethos of the academic and that of the fan. Before going on to discuss how the Shiel archives bring academics and fans into conflict, I will briefly summarize the discourses that define the academic and the fan. I will also describe the discourse of another figure central to the existence of archives, one who bears a close relationship to the fan--the collector. While academics, fans, and collectors may be broadly characterized as having in common a deep investment in culture, there are great differences in what Matt Hills calls the imagined subjectivities of these distinct groups or, the guiding discourses and ideals of they adopt (8). (2) Broadly speaking, academic culture is founded on Enlightenment principles which value reason over emotion, objectivity over subjectivity (Jensen 21, Frith 581). An academic would never, for example, describe his or her archival experience as taking cool notes, as Alex, the fan, does. Fans, who have a strong emotional engagement with and who express enthusiasm for their areas of interest, do not fare well under such a discourse. (3) The term fan itself, a term derived from the word fanatic, suggests a form of engagement with culture antithetical to that of the reasoning and objective academic. Fandom, as Joli Jensen, Lawrence Grossberg, Matt Hills, and others have argued, has tended to be pathologized by academics and this practice has served to uphold an elitist us/them dichotomy between forms of engagement with cultural life. …

The Question of a Science: Encyclopedistic Romanticism

allows itself to be represented by another science (Novalis 3:246, #49). (1) With this remark from the collection of fragmentary notes that were to form the basis of an encyclopedic project, Novalis indicates that the knowledge of a particular cannot be represented by that same science. Instead, it can only be truly given expression by yet another science. Thus, any definition of what a is, never mind itself, is always displaced from its proper domain. According to what Novalis says, then, a such as chemistry would have the ability to represent biology but would not be able to represent itself. This example could, however, be misleading. Since chemistry and biology are both hard sciences, what Novalis means can easily be reduced to saying that one conveys the scientific character of the other. But such an understanding does not represent another science; rather, it represents any that can be described as hard. Novalis's understanding of is not so restricted. In fact, Novalis develops his thinking on the nature of in such a way that the place of Romanticism in relation to the Enlightenment may well have to be rethought--not as rejection of the Enlightenment but as its radicalization. (2) To the extent that every is understood as a form of knowledge, what a is for Novalis cannot be restricted to what modernity has codified--according to Enlightenment principles--as the sciences. This inclusiveness becomes clear in another fragment to which Novalis gives the heading Encyclopedistic. In this fragment, Novalis refers to the doctrine of knowledge that every requires in order to establish itself as a in the following terms: is a philosophical, critical, mathematical, poetical, chemical, historical, doctrine of knowledge [Wissenschaftslehre] (Novalis, 3:321; #429). Here, under the rubric of encyclopedic thought, Novalis indicates the kind of understanding that permits one (and poetry is as much a here as chemistry) to represent another. When Novalis writes that the doctrine of knowledge is philosophical, critical, mathematical, etc., two things are stated. First, each or discipline (these terms are interchangeable here since they both describe a particular means of knowing) possesses a doctrine of knowledge that is specific to each. Second, knowledge is thought in terms of a central principle in which philosophy, criticism, math, poetry, chemistry, and history are all equally present. The two understandings of discipline and knowledge represented in this fragment are of course contradictory. A knowledge specifically philosophical or specifically chemical emphasizes its difference from another or discipline. The question Novalis's fragment poses concerns how this difference is related to an understanding that emphasizes just the opposite: that there is a doctrine of knowledge that is equally mathematical, poetical, etc., in other words, a doctrine equally present in each of the individual sciences. What then is such a doctrine? Clearly, it cannot be a doctrine in the traditional sense, a doctrine that governs each of the individual disciplines as if it were some kind of meta-knowledge. Yet, if it does not possess this sense, Novalis's use of this word still insists on some kind of identifiable content, on something that is recognizable as knowledge. Defining this content, as Walter Benjamin has pointed out, proved to be the greatest difficulty faced by the Jena Romantics. This difficulty. Benjamin notes, can be discerned in the different and conflicting answers it received: the absolute, the idea, religion (Benjamin 1:138-141 and 156). In the context of Novalis's remarks on encyclopedism, overcoming this difficulty would seem to require the production of an encyclopedia if such an answer were not already understood by Novalis as hopelessly inadequate--at least in the form bequeathed to Romanticism by the Enlightenment (the Encyclopedia of D'Alembert and Diderot). …

The Pacific War as a Civilizational Conflict?

26 Historically Speaking * September 2002 The Pacific War as a Civilizational Conflict? Genzo Yamamoto The concept of "civilizational conflict " has recently received both scholarly and public attention. Samuel Huntington's provocative thesis, which argues among other things that the world is made up ofcompeting cultural and religious civilizational groupings, has generated responses by Edward Said and others decrying die use ofsuch broad analytical categories . Such analysis, they argue, places insufficientweight on die complexities within societies and encourages die reification of static and mistaken stereotypes. Moreover, Huntington's critics note that the attempt to understand conflict along civilizational boundaries does not adequatelyaccount for the global interactions that have increased die exchange ofideas andvalues amongcivilizations. Despite their marked differences, the views ofbodi Huntington and his critics , I contend, are useful for revisiting the historical significance ofthe Pacific dieater in World War ?. Civilizational conflict was indeed a central issue; at the same time, it is critical to understand the complex developments widiinJapan prior to the war, as well as the exchange ofideas taking place across civilizational boundaries. Many keyJapanese leaders viewed die Pacific War as a civilizational conflict . The rationale given forJapan's foreign policy at the start ofthe China War in 193 7—the war that would lead direcdy into the Pacific War—shows how important the defense ofJapan's civilizationwas toJapanese leaders. For example , die Shewa ResearchAssociation, die think tank affiliated widi Prince Konoe Fumimaro (prime minister whenJapan began the war with China and in the period immediately prior to the outbreak ofwar with die U.S.), carefullysoughtto locateJapan's civilizational role in world history vis-à-vis other civilizations . Prominentphilosophers such as Nishida Kitaro and Watsuji Tetsuro did die same. An official document published by the MinistryofEducation in 1937, the Kokutaino hongi ("Cardinal Essence of the National Polity"), illustrates the fact diatWestern civilizationwas perceived as antidietical toJapanese civilization. DefiningJapan's enemy also clarifiedJapan's identity. The Kokutai no hongi criticized "Europeanization" and die "ideologies ofthe Enlightenment" and die "rationalism " and "individualism" that arose from them. The document called forJapanese to return to die standpoint peculiar to our country, clarify our immortal national entity, sweep aside everything in the way ofadulation, bring into being our original condition .... This means diat the present conflict seen in our people's ideas, the unrest in their modes of life, the confused state of their civilization, can be put right only by a thorough investigation by us of the intrinsic nature of Occidental ideologies and by grasping the true meaning of our national entity. The Kokutai no hongi reiterated the qualities essential toJapanese civilization, particularly loyalty to die emperor, which entailed rejecting the notion that individual self-fulfillment arose from the demand for one's rights in favor ofsubmitting one's life to the emperor. These were onlysurface reflections of a much deeper and sophisticated philosophical disagreement with Enlightenment philosophyregarding the nature of the human individual, culture, society, the state, and nature. To die extent diat Enlightenmentphilosophywas understood as characterizing Western civilization, it was indeed a civilization built uponvalues antidietical to the values upon which modernJapanese civilization had been built. This was a "war between civilizations ." The ideas expressed in the Kokutaino hongiwere notnew. The drafter of the 1889 Meiji Constitution upon which the modernJapanese nationstate was based, Prince Ito Hirobumi, had explicidysoughtto shape die documentso as to oppose die ideas ofdie European Enlightenment. Ito drew from German Romantic legal and political philosophers, who were explicit in their antagonism toward Enlightenment ideas. They extolled the importance of the "volk" in the formation ofcommunities and states. These conservative thinkers viewed as fundamentally flawed the Enlightenment principles that gave ontological, legal, and political priority to the individual over largersocial and cultural entities. Rather, diey believed diatdie proper developmentofstate and community required a more organic understandingofthe particularities ofa people —their history, traditions, customs, and dieirland. These larger entities, not the individual , should formdie basis ofdie state's legal and political structures. After studying con- September 2002Historically Speaking27 stitutional systemsinvarious Europeanstates, civilizing mission to mean "spiritual colo- military, though no doubt diatplayed a part Ito wrote: "The situation in our country is nization," or the spreading ofdie virtues of It was also the return to power ofa certain characterized bythe...

L.-A. Caraccioli et son œuvre : la mesure d'une avancée de la pensée chrétienne vers les Lumières

This article, presentating Caraccioli' s life, looks at the influences on him in order to understand how a certain type of Christian thinking could move towards Enlightenment. Caraccioli can be seen as typical inasmuch as he was an honest, sometimes elegant and surprising thinker, sensitive to contemporary developments. His early education led him to oppose most enlightened principles ; but he changed under the influence of 17th-century Christian social thought, the model of the primitive Church, Jansenist political analysis and a reading of Malebranche. Finally, we see how his position changed radically in the early 1780s, following figures like Rousseau or the Physiocrats, who reinjected religious feeling into enlightened discourse. His priorities changed, and the presentation of theological principles was replaced by a more reforming pragmatism ; however, this finally led to a series of difficulties which the Revolution often revealed and which remain at the heart of questions concerning the link between religion and Western modernity.

Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American Enlightenment, 1811-1851

An outspoken abolitionist, a founder of the Free Soil and Republican parties, and a leading member of the U.S. Senate for more than twenty years, Charles Sumner (1811-1874) has always figured prominently in histories of the American Civil War. For the most part, however, he has been depicted as a psychologically troubled extremist, a fanatical opponent of slavery whose self-righteousness was matched only by his arrogance. In this book, Anne-Marie Taylor challenges that longstanding view, offering in its stead the portrait of a man animated more by principle than by impulse or ambition. According to Taylor, Sumner's reform-minded politics, including his fervent commitment to put an end to slavery, must be understood in the context of a young nation still struggling to live up to the Enlightenment ideals embraced by its founders and embodied in its Constitution. Focusing on the first forty years of Sumner's life, before he took public office, Taylor traces the evolution of his character and thought among Boston's cultural elite. His belief in the virtues of cosmopolitanism, in the dignity of the human intellect and conscience, and in the possibility of a cultivated and just society, all find their roots in an education steeped in Enlightenment principles. At the same time, as a child of New England Puritanism and Revolutionary republicanism, Sumner was raised to believe in the moral obligation of the individual to work for the common good. As Taylor shows in this well-written biography, much of the triumph and tragedy of Sumner's story - the energy of his idealism as well as the poignancy of his eventual disappointment - derives from the overpowering sense of duty and national destiny imbued by his upbringing.

Un projet avorté d'intégration républicaine. L'institution nationale des colonies (1797-1802)

A failed plan for republican integration : the National Institution for the Colonies (1797-1802). The former Collège de la Marche in Paris was the site of an original republican experiment during the First Republic, aimed at providing a common education for the sons of the new (essentially black and mulatto) West Indian ruling class that emerged during the revolution and for the heirs to the great white planter families. There were also to be some sons of colonial civil servants and of Oriental dignitaries. The experiment was directed by abbé Coisnon, a friend of Grégoire's and a contact of Toussaint-Louverture's in 1802. It was encouraged by the Minister for the Navy, Truguet, in 1797, under the auspices of the representatives of the colony of Saint-Domingo at the Directoire legislature. This experiment shows, even more clearly than other institutions, the official colonial policy of the Directoire, which was republican integration. Its sudden closure under the Consulat, together with the reestablishment of West Indian slavery, shows how important was the change in May 1802, marking a break with Enlightenment principles of emancipation.

The Marquis de Sade: a life

Neil Schaeffer presents here a wholly original, compellingly human portrait of the divine Marquis, the enigmatic legend whose name is synonymous with brutal perversion and cruelty. Against a magnificently embroidered backdrop of eighteenth-century France, he shows us Sade's incredible life of sexual appetite, adherence to Enlightenment principles, imprisonment, scandal, and above all inexhaustible imagination. Based on a decade of research and utilizing work never before published in English, The Marquis de Sade is a definitive work that confronts nearly two hundred years of myth to reveal a Promethean figure of astonishing complexity.

Proceedings of the 1998 International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter

Proceedings of the 1998 International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter Barbara Fields Bernstein and Brian Muldoon The 1998 International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter, the continuation of the Cobb-Abe group, met in Indianapolis, Indiana, from May 1 to 3, 1998. Following the reading of a statement from Prof. Masao Abe in which he stated his regret at not being able to attend this important gathering and his hope that the encounter would begin to address the global crises facing humankind today, John Cobb provided a brief history of the encounter for the new participants. First Paper: “Buddhism and Ecological Ethics,” by Chatsumarn Kabilsingh Prof. Kabilsingh began the morning discussion by focusing on the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination, which reveals the interconnectedness of all life, as the starting place for fashioning a response to the environmental crisis. Suggesting that the inner and outer worlds are necessarily related (“As the king is, so are the sun and the moon”), she recommended adopting certain monastic practices to create a more harmonious relationship with nature. This provoked a discussion about the need for concrete action in addressing the behaviors not so much of individuals as of institutions. Institutions are uniquely human, embodying human imperfection even as they shape who we are. Noting that both traditions tended to focus on individual awakening or redemption, the question was asked how the principles of individual enlightenment or salvation could be applied to a community or institution. Further, there needs to be some practical balance between the two traditions’ extreme views of civilization, one of which places it in the heart of the forest (the East) and the other that finds it in the marbled city (the West). This balance, which must restore the tree of life to the heart of the city, will require a new model of institutions as living organisms rather than lifeless monoliths or random encounters. The balance of the morning’s discussion addressed the relationship between community and institutions and the “eschatological hope” of both Christianity and Buddhism. Chatsumarn concluded the session by highlighting the principle of interrelationship as the common ground between Christianity and Buddhism. [End Page 193] Second Paper: “Self and Nature in Christianity (and Buddhism),” by Sallie Mcfague McFague’s paper generated a spirited discussion about a series of paired concepts: Self-other, individual-community, sacramental-prophetic, absolute-relative, commonality-distinctiveness, vertical-horizontal, thinking-feeling, and scientific-aesthetic. The observation that ethics must be based on empirical data led to an exploration of the relationship of the relative (concrete reality that can be described) and the absolute (that which cannot be described, but may or may not be expressed through that which is particular) levels of truth. Interdependence, in the Buddhist model, includes an appreciation of the particularity of each thing while also recognizing the sameness of all. Speakers agreed that we must think both relatively and absolutely (although a new way of applying language to these concepts is needed). Meaningful environmental ethics must be grounded in the sacramental, in scientific particularity as perceived through the heart of the aesthete in intimate relationship with the natural world. But how could we move from these theoretical reflections into a closer encounter with that world? Stephanie Kaza would provide the needed vehicle in her comprehensive overview of the environmental crisis in the next session. Third Paper: “Overcoming the Grip of Consumerism,” by Stephanie Kaza It is fair to say that Kaza’s paper catalyzed provocative directions for thought during the three-day encounter, both because it provided the factual data from which an ethical discussion might proceed and because it focused the conversation on the role of consumerism in the environmental crisis. Prof. Kaza provided a telling comparison of consumerism and liberation practice as paths to self-realization and fulfillment, showing how the twelve links of dependent origination are integral to both paths. Breaking the grip of consumerism requires breaking any one of these links, like an addiction. This generated a spirited discussion about the relationship between enlightenment—whether “sudden” or otherwise—and consumerism and the relationship between consumerism and the more fundamental human tendency toward the acceptance of suffering over practices that promote liberation. While education was obviously critical for a...

Gut Reactions of a Historian to a Missionary Tract

IN THIS INTELLECTUAL TOUR-DE-FORCE ROBERT F. BERKHOFER, JR., appeals for a new kind of history and a new kind of reviewing, which should break free from the hegemonic disciplinary policing, the restraints and delusions of conventional history discourse. I do not pretend to write such a new (postmodernist) review or even a conventional review, methodically examining the book's themes and arguments. I have just finished Beyond the Great Story in a confused state of guilt, anger, fear for my discipline and for my own intellectual competence. While the frisson lasts I will grasp the moment, forsake supposedly discredited Enlightenment principles and practices, and give my gut reactions to a book that is, above all, a missionary tract. To foreground my own multicultural placement, I am a white, middle-aged Irishman, a historian teaching American studies and specializing in American Indian history at a Finnish university. My path crossed that of Robert Berkhofer many decades ago and he was most helpful to me in my search for a graduate school in the United States. A major scholar in my own field, Berkhofer has written books that influenced me as a younger historian: Salvation and the Savage: an Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 17871862 (1965), and The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (1978). I acknowledge-nay,

John Quidor and the Demonic Imagination: Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman (c.1828)

John Quidor and the Demonic Imagination: Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman (c.1828) Rebecca Bedell (bio) John Quidor’s (1801–1881) works are closely linked to the writings of Washington Irving. Nearly two-thirds of his extant canvasses depict scenes drawn from Irving’s tales of old Dutch New York. Such marked allegiance to a single author would seem to suggest that Quidor found in Irving’s work plots, characters, and themes which admirably suited his own artistic ends. As many scholars have noted, however, Quidor was rarely content merely to illustrate Irving’s tales or echo his themes. 1 He rather used the stories as a base from which to explore ideas more distinctively his own. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. John Quidor (1800–1881), Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman. Oil on canvas; 225/9” x 30 1/6”. Yale University Art Gallery; Mabel Brady Garvan Collection. This is certainly the case with Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman of about 1828, a painting inspired by Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (figure 1). In none of Quidor’s other works does he distance himself so far from his literary source; in none of his other literary paintings does he suppress the narrative or subvert the themes of the text to the extent that he does in this, his earliest extant treatment of an Irving subject. In transferring the tale from printed page to canvas, Quidor altered both its mood and its message. Although both Irving and Quidor take the imagination as a central theme of their work, the painter offers a far bleaker, more frightening vision of this cerebral faculty. In the early nineteenth century, suspicion and hostility tinged American attitudes towards the imagination. 2 In a nation founded on Enlightenment principles, adhering to the doctrines of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, and committed to progress, rationality, and practicality, indulgence in imaginative endeavors was widely regarded as an avoidance of responsibility, as an activity that could render one incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction, and, hence, as a significant threat to the social order. Such attitudes deeply affected the way American artists and writers felt about their calling, evoking responses that ranged from defensive defiance to guilt and anxiety. Since their feelings about imaginative activities were central to their sense of their own self-worth and the value of their productions, it is hardly surprising that many explored them in their works—as Irving and Quidor did in their differing ways. Bryan Wolf, in his brilliant comparison of Quidor and Irving in Romantic Revision, has drawn out Quidor’s conservative attitude towards the imagination; the painter seems to have internalized his pragmatic society’s fear and distrust of it. Irving, on the other hand, while sharing some of Quidor’s trepidation, also saw positive uses for the imagination, deploying it to combat, in his own rather mild way, [End Page 111] what he saw as the relentlessly rationalist and materialist tenor of his times. 3 A comparison of Quidor’s Ichabod with Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” brings the distance between the two men into sharp focus. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is one of the tales from Irving’s The Sketch Book (1819–20). Set a decade or so after the Revolutionary War, the story takes place in a drowsy Dutch village on the eastern shore of the Hudson River. The slim plot revolves around a rivalry between the Yankee schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and the burly local hero Brom Bones, both of whom are set upon winning the hand of the plump Dutch coquette Katrina van Tassel. Through his delineation of the hapless Ichabod, whose name means “inglorious” or “without honor,” 4 Irving lampooned contemporary Yankee American culture—its restlessness, its instability, and, above all, its crass materialism. 5 Ichabod’s desire for Katrina, for example, was less an affair of the heart than a passion of the pocketbook. Her rosy cheeks and dainty feet, though appealing, roused him less than the thought of her paternal domain. This, he imagined, could “be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and...