Tragic Flaw Research Articles

셰익스피어 비극 『코리올레이너스』의 서구공연과 이현우공연의 비교 연구

Among Shakespeare’s tragedies, Coriolanus has been unpopular to the audience in its performance. However, T. S. Eliot evaluated it as the “most assured artistic success” in spite of its low number of performances. This political tragedy deals with an authoritative general of Rome, Marcius, who won the war with Volscian soldiers and received the title of ‘Coriolanus.’ However, he used to ignore the citizens due to his arrogant pride by which he cursed the disgusting smell from their mouths. Even though the Senators agreed to recommend him as a consul member, he would not admit the citizens’ demand for ‘humbleness ceremony’ wearing tattered clothes. Furthermore, he dared to insult them with haughty curses, for which he came to be expelled from Rome by the manipulation of plebeians. They were the representatives to restrain the dictatorship of the governors under the republican influence of the era. The western performances can be divided into two tendencies: the one is to describe Coriolanus with “haughty dignity of demeanor, the same energy of will, and unbending sternness of temper” which led him to save his country from the invasion of the enemy, but he faces his fatal destruction owing to his tragic flaw, that is to say, extreme courage and pride. Terry Kemble belongs to this group. The other, Dominic Dromgoole’s interpretation, describes the citizens positively who tried to revolt against the dictatorship of the aristocrats so that as a director, he compares Coriolanus’s war to the Iraq War and Coriolanus to Bush and Blare. Aldo Billingslea experiments in his performance with the method of trans-gender. Jonathan Kent invents a temporary unique setting for his performance in which he uses a gymnasium as the stage for actors’ efficient movements during the war. Hyonu Lee directed this drama first in Korea at the ‘Liberty Theatre’ located in the Seoul Art Center. He tried to stand in the middle of two sides: Coriolanus as the courageous savior for his country with tragic flaw on the one side and the democratic citizens who revolt against dictatorship of the hero on the other. He suggests that Shakespeare was objective in dealing with this conflict of both sides. He invents his creative methods of direction. He shows the images of revolting citizens in Korea, by means of 15 monitors, who demanded democracy against military dictators. He induces the audience to feel the spontaneity of the citizens’ movement by comparing the situation of Rome to that of Korea. He also uses the entire auditorium as the stage in which actors and actresses can mix with the audience. His artistic achievement in performance can be evaluated as the new frontier that can level up the status of Korea in Shakespeare performances in the future.

The Religious Counterculture

The claims of liberal theology, if taken seriously, generate radical obligations. What would the world look like if religious liberals became religiously observant?

La guerre amoureuse par Jean-Marie Rouart

ROUART, JEAN-MARIE. La guerre amoureuse. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-07013104 -4. Pp. 244. 18 a. A literary and art critic delivers a presentation at a college near Helsinki. His conference is met with polite defiance with the exception of a one half-Russian student by the name of Helena. Jean-Marie Rouart immediately establishes an atmosphere of absolute purity, clarity, and tranquility which bores the protagonist to the brink of death. Helena will be the narrator’s “pathetic fallacy”: “La vie revenait comme la sève qui fait reverdir un bois mort. J’étais réconcilié avec moim ême. J’étais amoureux” (40). The protagonist’s meeting with a marabout from Tchad—or is it an apparition?—enhances his desire to fulfill his destiny with Helena, even though warned of the catastrophic outcome. Nearly every image utilized by Rouart involves water, its power and its ambiguity. His writing flows like poetry, and the writers and artists he draws inspiration from reflect sentiments in his character’s own life, from Constant to Fromentin, for, as we learn, the tragic flaw of the narrator is not being able to write creatively himself. Thus, he feels himself denied of genuine love, the love of oneself for whom one really is. While entering the relationship with Helena, the narrator is unaware of the maelstrom he is sucked into. He muses on the decency and virtue of this young lady, so very different from the lustful and lascivious Finnish blonds he sees around him. After their one-night-stand however, he cannot forget her torrid passion, and he revisits his memory of her in the torrential Paris summer rain: Le souvenir d’Helena me revenait d’une manière indirecte. D’abord dans l’appétit que je retrouvais pour la vie. Elle m’avait réveillé d’une sorte de somnolence [...] Elle me redonnait de l’intérêt pour les choses, du goût pour les saveurs, le désir d’en humer les parfums. (73) His obsession begins, and with it, his fall, as he tries to reconnect with her, to no avail. The elusive Helena suddenly arrives in Paris. She and the narrator pick up where they left off, but in his attempt to spice things up with erotic objects and enhancements, he finds her repelled. Her reference to their difference in age does not help either. However, because of the age issue, he feels safe taking her to a dinner celebrating Molnar, a satyr-like elderly artist from her motherland, who will be featured in the next issue of the magazine he directs. This dinner becomes the catalyst of events leading to the protagonist’s jealousy, lack of confidence, paranoia, and more. Helena is not what she seems. The narrator, Helena, her fiancé, and Molnar are caught in a web of intrigue from which the narrator may not exit in one piece. He is warned on three occasions that Helena is not his destiny : “Bizarrement, je n’étais pas satisfait: je souffrais de ne plus souffrir. J’avais mal de ne plus avoir mal. Une sorte de vide” (210). When such an ardent passion dies, the world can seem without a pulse, colorless and dry. The narrator can only achieve happiness and peace with Helena in the death of one of them. In this short tempestuous novel by Rouart, all of the emotions of love pass fleetingly. Is love masochism? Is it hurt? Is it exaltation? Is it substance? Is love a war we are all doomed to lose? Is it flying to the heights and then descending precipitously with no net? Obviously, love is all of the above. Rouart’s novel is fluid, visual, and exquisitely written. Each word and reference counts. It is the tale of how most of us rather ordinary individuals have no idea how to hold on to someone/ 796 FRENCH REVIEW 85.4 something wonderful, and how we often sabotage the happiness we have: no matter. We are here for but a small stay, so how does any of it actually impact us? Millburn H.S. (NJ), emerita Davida Brautman VÉDRINES, JEAN. La belle étoile. Paris: Fayard, 2010. ISBN 978...

The Tragic Hero of the Post - Classical Renaissance

Just as the drama of ancient Greece is dominated by the classical order, English drama spearheaded by William Shakespeare, is dominated by the Renaissance post-classical period. Pre-renaissance drama in England was based mostly on allegorical plays extolling Christian values. One of the morality plays that survived the period is Everyman. But the type stood its ground throughout the Elizabethan period. Theatre, which became public, was a tradition handed down from the classical Greek period. Therefore, it was the belief that when a prince fell, that fall was tantamount to the fall of Lucifer. The victim was forever doomed and excluded eternity. And that was the Christian concept of tragedy.Marlowe's emergence as a playwright with Dr. Faustus reinforced the notion that when a fall comes the way of a hero it is because of willful indulgence, lustful desires and incapacity to repent. Hubris, therefore proved to be the sin of Dr. Faustus. Thus, the hero obviously becomes responsible for own downfall. This is equally the fate of King Lear, Coriolanus, and Othello Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Apart from this received tradition coupled with the Christian dimension, the characterization of the English tragic hero was further influenced by Machiavelli through the publication of The Prince (1560). This influence accounts for the blossoming of Machiavellian figures such as Edmund in King Lear and Richard III.Seneca published own adaptations of Greek tragedies. In these adaptations, he explores themes like problems of political power and corruption; the loneliness of kingship and jealousy. These themes are embellished appearances, ghosts, as well as horrific and gory incidents which Seneca described in sublime language.Folktales, one of the received traditions, were effectively used. For example, King Lear, unlike King Oedipus, is conceived on the basis of the Christian notion of original sin. King Lear is therefore cast in the mould of the tragic hero with the tragic flaw inherent in character. His demand that three daughters prove their filial love and fidelity so they can earn their inheritance is naive. This shows gullibility as a parent because he is easily taken in by the false declarations of two elder daughters. As a result, King Lear disinherits Cordelia, the true daughter to the advantage of Reagan and Goneril. His conviction that duty must be rewarded and ingratitude should be punished coupled with inordinate desire to retire into a peaceful old age without the cares of the state is unconvincing. The falsity of Reagan and Goneril which the King realises later reveals injustice to Cordelia and foolishness in giving up kingdom to two false daughters who later maltreat him. In anger, the king rejects shelter and goes out wandering in the storm. His tragic physical suffering at the mercy of the elements and mental torture make his mind turns as he wonders at the cruelty of daughters. Thus, whereas in King Oedipus the concept of fate creates despair, in King Lear, there is hope and faith when at the end the forces of evil are completely defeated.

Framing Tiger’s Troubles: Comparing Traditional and Social Media

This research explored how press outlets and fans framed professional golfer Tiger Woods’s marital infidelity. A textual analysis of newspaper reports and discussion postings on Tiger Woods’s official Facebook page was conducted. Analysis revealed that press accounts framed Woods’s actions as a tragic flaw that precipitated his fall from grace, while also reveling in the salacious details of the extramarital affairs. Conversely, fans primarily framed these incidents as private matters that demonstrated Woods’s human nature. The analysis suggests that social-media sites are valuable public relations tools that athletes can use to quickly generate support that counteracts perceived negative media framing. Social-media sites also enable fans to enhance perceptions of closeness with athletes as fans interject themselves into athletes’ media narratives.

<i>The Philadelphia Campaign, Volume II: Germantown and the Roads to Valley Forge</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Philadelphia Campaign, Volume II: Germantown and the Roads to Valley Forge Joseph R. Fischer Thomas J. McGuire . The Philadelphia Campaign, Volume II: Germantown and the Roads to Valley Forge. (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2007. Pp. 432, illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $34.95.) The Battle of Brandywine left Washington's army bowed but not beaten. With his flank turned, Washington and his subordinates fought a successful delaying action that allowed the army to escape destruction. Nonetheless, it had been a close thing. A more aggressive general than General William Howe might well have smashed the Continental army and forced an end to the two-year-old rebellion, but what might have been was not what was, and the American army lived to fight another day. Thomas J. McGuire addresses the campaign that followed Brandywine in the second volume of The Philadelphia Campaign. The focus is on Washington's attempt to reverse the decision at Brandywine with an audacious night attack on British positions in and around Germantown. The author then ably describes the move toward winter quarters at Valley Forge. [End Page 254] In the spirit of the first volume, the second features lively prose and varied perspectives ranging from generals to privates as well as the civilians caught up in the maelstrom of war. It is a work more focused on key leaders than the first volume. Despite his intellect and insight, General William Howe's tragic flaw was that he was willing to hesitate at just the right moment to allow his opponent opportunity. Washington appears to be a man growing in his job, able to find the advantage when offered to ensure that there would be a tomorrow for the army he led. The war eventually proved that Washington's ability to sustain an army in being for years eventually exhausted the British government and its people. The days following the American defeats at Brandywine and Paoli could have been psychologically devastating for the American cause. Philadelphians watched powerless as British troops marched along the streets of William Penn's city. Fort Mifflin, along with the small Pennsylvania Navy, kept the Delaware River closed to British warships, but it seemed clear that this was but a temporary stay. Washington sought a solution to the disintegrating civil-military solution by attempting something he had not yet done, an attack on the main British army. In the past, he had limited himself to the defensive, allowing his foe to come to him. The victories at Trenton and Princeton had been against an exposed garrison or a rear guard action, not main force engagements. Washington understood that his army was not the equal of its foes, thus he sought to leverage circumstances to compensate for the inexperience of his soldiers. Washington's solution was to have his army carry out a night attack employing four different avenues of approach to the British encampment at Germantown. On the wings of his army he placed militia, while Continental regulars under John Sullivan and Nathanael Greene held the center. If all went according to plan, the Continental army would fall upon its foe in the early morning light of 4 October 1777 in a double envelopment. Unfortunately, Washington's plan exceeded the capabilities of his army. Night marches and limited visibility attacks are some of the most difficult operations for highly skilled soldiers using modern communications equipment, let alone an eighteenth-century army of relative novices. The frictions of war overcame Washington's best intentions. Washington's men had to cover roughly sixteen miles between their assembly area and the British/Hessian encampment on a moonless night. Continental cavalry had not clearly marked the routes causing moments of confusion and delay. The right wing, consisting of militia, arrived first, fired [End Page 255] a few shots at Hessian units and then without orders, withdrew. Sullivan's column moved down the Germantown Road encountering resistance from British forces barricaded in the house of John Chew, a substantial stone construction. Sullivan, at the insistence of Henry Knox, elected to reduce the house rather than bypass it. Fog delayed Greene although most of his men did arrive to drive British forces...

Heinrich von Kleist's 'Poetology of the Extreme' in the Light of Freud and Aristotle

Kleist has often been regarded as a writer whose works are characterized by irrationality and emotional extremes, a judgement which has been variously deplored and celebrated. Not surprisingly, therefore, they have attracted a variety of interpretations derived from the ideas of Sigmund Freud, most recently in the wake of Lacan's 'return to Freud' and the application of his readings of Freud to literary criticism. A rather different poetological development has been to link Freudian with Aristotelian ideas based on the Poetics, using the shared territory occupied by the concept of anagnorisis (recognition). My essay pursues this approach by focusing specifically on the theme of denial (and its close relation, delusion), a major feature of Freud's theory of defence mechanisms which, I propose, operates for Kleist as a counterpart to the Aristotelian hamartia (tragic flaw). I argue that the combination of these ingredients initiates a distinctive and highly original progression towards anagnorisis and determines the outcomes in the works selected. This hypothesis is tested against the evidence of two major dramas, a tragedy and an averted tragedy, and is complemented by the transposition of the same combination into the narrative mode as demonstrated in a major Erzählung.

A Tranquil Star (Unpublished Stories) (review)

Tranquil Star (Unpublished Stories), by Primo Levi, translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. 167 pp. $21.95. Twenty years ago, the Italian chemist, writer, and survivor Primo Levi fell to his death from the stairwell of his apartment building in Turin. Within hours, debate exploded as to whether his death was an accident or suicide and, if the latter, how this might force us to reinterpret his legacy as and survivor. Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, and Susan Sontag all weighed in, but the debate over his death has overshadowed the larger significance of his place as thinker after Auschwitz. This new collection of Levi's writings, the first publication in English of Levi's fiction since 1990, gives readers sampling of his extraordinary intellect and wide range. It is mere appetizer for Norton's ambitious project to publish Levi's entire oeuvre in volumes sometime before the decade is out. Two stories, Bear Meat and A Tranquil Star, appeared earlier this year in the New Yorker while Knall first appeared in Harper's. The stories are deftly translated by Ann Goldstein (a at the New Yorker) and Alessandra Bastagli (writer and editor at Palgrave Macmillan). Jenny McPhee, writer, novelist, and scholar in residence at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University, translated Censorship in Bitinia. Since Levi is not as well known in the United States as Elie Wiesel, readers might have been helped by some biographical details in the introduction. Levi's memoir of life in the extermination camp. Survival in Auschwitz, has claimed its rightful place among the masterpieces of literature. When the camp was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945, Levi began picaresque odyssey, as recounted in The Truce. His last work, The Drowned and the Saved, is arguably the most profound meditation on the Shoah. Although best known for these works on the concentration camp universe, Levi did not want to be known as Holocaust writer; he aspired to the simple title of writer without any adjective (Holocaust, Italian, or Jewish). Besides his masterpieces, Levi also wrote poetry, essays, science fiction, and novel concerning Jewish partisans in World War II. As both chemist and writer, Levi felt the divorce of science from humanism as the tragic flaw of the twentieth century. These stories try to reconcile the two cultures. He reveled in this stance straddling worlds. I am centaur, he once wrote enigmatically, as all men and women are centaurs: a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust. …

Averting the Captain Vere 'Veer': Billy Budd as Melville's Republican Response to Plato

This article shows how Melville's Billy Budd, rightly one of law and literature's most widely studied canonical texts, answers Plato's challenge in Book X of the Republic: Show how poets create better citizens, especially better rulers, or banish them from the commonwealth of reasoned law. Captain Vere is a flawed but instructive version of the Republic's philosopher-king, even as his story is precisely the sort of poetry that Plato should willing allow, by his own republican principles, into the ideal polity. Not surprisingly, the novella shows how law's agents must be wise, even as their law must be philosophical, if they are to do justice. Paradoxically, the novella also shows how poetry can save law's agents, particularly the more Platonic, from Captain Vere's veer, a dangerous turn from fully legal justice to false and fatal severity. Captain Vere has a tragic flaw all too common among leaders otherwise completely conscientious and competent: When faced with a range of courses - all legal, moral, and practicable - Vere invariably charts the most personally painful. Part of his no pain, no gain course steers him into fastidious studies that exclude both mere fiction and pure theory, ironically banishing Plato himself along with his poets. But Vere's own story, with its narrator's frequent theoretical interruptions and occasional allusions to Plato, demonstrates that the reading of just such stories may deliver leaders like him from over-harsh treatment of themselves and their most vulnerable charges. The novella, then, not only reveals Captain Vere's veer; it also shows a way to avert that ever dangerous, often fatal tack. If the studious captain had been prepared to study stories like his own, his readings might have made him a vastly better guardian of his symbolic flock, particularly of Billy Budd, his most innocent sheep; had Starry Vere been more a philosopher-king and less a surrogate father-god, he need never have made his excruciating mistake, sacrificing his most beloved foster son to save their microcosmic world.

Regarding the Miller Girls

“Daisy Miller” is a story about American Exceptionalism; about the banal and tawdry tragedy that comes of having faith in it; about Daisy’s (the lawyer Giovanelli’s “new found land”) tragic flaw—that she is unaware of how others perceive her, or she doesn’t care; or about ambiguities, or seeing things. It can be made to speak volumes about the power of perception, as about what Tayyab Mahmoud has called “[a]doption and deployment of identity.” Or about the seductive power of fictions of specifically national identity: for James critic Leslie Fiedler, “the American Girl is innocent by definition, mythically innocent; and her purity depends upon nothing she says or does… .”A contemporary American anti/heroine, Judith Miller, is likewise figured as interpretable: did she need a “freely given” “personal” waiver of confidentiality to identify her source, and when did she get one; was she a “good, honorable principled reporter” or “A Woman of Mass Destruction”; and what did New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller’s accusation of an “entanglement” with “Scooter” Libby connote?This essay takes the intrigues generated around “the Miller Girls” as a guide to reading the stories told by, surrounding, excised from, and immanent in the 2005 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in In re Grand Jury Subpoena, Judith Miller, and explores some fictions of American Exceptionalism cultivated both by “common law constitutionalism,” and by a federal judiciary laying down the law in the shadows cast by the “War on Terror” and the jurisdictions of expatriation.

Political Art, Distracted

THOMAS HIRSCHHORN: UTOPIA, UTOPIA = ONE WORLD, ONE WAR, ONE ARMY, ONE DRESS CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA MARCH 10-MAY 13, 2006 I imagine Thomas Hirschhorn's exhibition = World, War, Army, Dress pleased many: artists, art observers, academics (particularly those who have, for the last decade or so, told students that polities and art do not mix), passionate liberals (as well as those who see themselves as timelessly anti-establishment, but who have shied away from activism), and busy art school undergraduates who will be comfortable with the street look and duct tape construction of the exhibition. However, for all its ambiguity, faced with the mass of Hirschhorn's collecting (thousands of objects in tight proximity), one could not help but think about the deformity of war. This was the show's success--though a measured one. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The installation was comprised of uniforms from around the world, documentary and fashion photos of soldiers in camouflage, music videos set among battles and explosions (the singers camouflage-clad), and consumer items appropriating the pattern of camouflage such as snowboards, T-shirts, and halter dresses. There were also scrap wood trees with mannequin bodies, maps, and globes of the world growing camouflage tape mounds. There were toys of war placed both in battlefields and in a large doll house, books on war scattered in a living room covered in camouflage tape, and forty-foot, ambiguous, cardboard forms that could be bullets, missiles, or submarines. The installation filled three galleries--a lot of real estate to take up, and to Hirschhorn's credit, one does not begrudge him his excess. The tragic flaw of Utopia was that Hirschhorn allowed the viewer to see how entirely seduced he is by critical theory; he threw aside a chance to serve as a witness, choosing instead this infatuation, which is unfortunate since he succeeded at making a map that shows the cognitive discord of war. Less importantly, the subtleties of his One Dress message--consumerism's appropriation of camouflage in civilian clothing--was less compelling than the immersion experience he gave viewers of all sorts of objects. In them we could see one enormous, global casualty: ourselves as conquerors, our own loss of righteousness making us victims of politics and greed in the end. If I had not read Marcus Steinweg's accompanying essay, Worldplay (2005), in full, I would have been more inspired by Utopia, which featured printed fragments of the essay in the installation. (1) As posters and signs hung throughout the exhibition space, Steinweg's text fragments functioned adequately as Barthesian empty signs, and contrasted with the very specific war documentation. They could have been taken from any critical theory text. Open-ended, they sometimes related to objects nearby, but their solipsism more often represented other breakdowns of meaning that accompany war in our time. (I found myself remarking that in our time--a time capable of so much technologically--the appearance of brutal carnage seems like a special effect from a science fiction film, a film about an evil civilization in a surreal time. …

Tragic undertones in Elliot Zondi's Ukufa Kukashaka ‘The death of Shaka’—1960

This article aims at investigating the elements of tragedy in Elliot Zondi's literary work, Ukufa kukaShaka. The article highlights Zondi's main concern, namely the arguments for and against Shaka's assassination. What makes this drama interesting is that it gives another viewpoint on the death of Shaka. Zondi's perspective on the assassination is deeply influenced by the political climate of apartheid South Africa. The author of this article hypothesizes that the play displays a process of the tragic hero's fall, which is due to an error in judgement (tragic flaw) caused by hubris (overconfidence), a kind of hamartia that is common in classic tragedies. Shaka, the king of high standing, believes that he is chosen by the ancestors to rule over the Zulu nation. This belief makes him forget he is still human, which results in his making a number of miscalculations and leads ultimately to his doom. Shaka has a wide vision of a universal dispensation to benefit the Zulu, as well as other African nations that have had to contend with the threat of land rape and invasion from the white intruders. His death is, however, a great loss to the nation.

Problem krivde pri Ojdipu in Josefu K.

V razpravi primerjamo Ojdipa in Josefa K. s stališča hamartije, najpoprej kot usodne zmote in pozneje kot osebne junakove odzivnosti. Ojdipova samoanaliza in Josefov način življenja, v katerega je neupravičeno posegal »Z dvajsetimi rokami«, vodita v kazen, pri Ojdipu v samokazovanje, pri Josefu v brutalno usmrtitev. Pomembno vlogo na poti k anagnorisi imajo pri obeh junakih ženske, prerok Tejrezij in duhovnik v stolnici; primerjava Ojdipove smrti na Kolonu in Josefove v kamnolomu pa pokaže na obredno čistost in na razkroj obreda, hkrati pa se Ojdipova usodnost premakne v območje židovsko-krščanskega upanja.

Pathological gambling: an increasing public health problem

Pathological gambling: an increasing public health problem

Nothing Is as It Seems: The Tragedy of the Implicit in Euripides' "Hippolytus"

In this valuable book, Hanna M. Roisman provides a uniquely comprehensive look at Euripides' Hippolytus. Roisman begins with an examination of the ancient preference for the implicit style, and suggests a possible reading of Euripides' first treatment of the myth which would account for the Athenian audience's reservations about his Hippolytus Veiled. She proceeds to analyze significant scenes in the play, including Hippolytus' prayer to Artemis, Phaedra's delirium, Phaedra's 'confession' speech, and the interactions between Theseus and Hippolytus. Concluding with a discussion of the meaning of the tragic in Hippolytus, Roisman questions the applicability in this case of the idea of the tragic flaw. Nothing Seems as It Is includes extensive comparisons of Euripides' play with the Phaedra of Seneca. This is a very important book for students and scholars of Greek tragedy, literature, and rhetoric.

Beowulf & the bane of the Thirteenth Retainer

There is a thirteenth retainer in the band of thanes who eventually fail Beowulf in his last fight, and his enigmatic presence has often been noted as part of a possible allegorical reading of the episode as strongly allusive to Gethsemane and the betrayal of Christ. Yet it seems to me that this discreet and, as it were, intersticial character is functionally perhaps more rewarding to study than it may seem at first. His theft of a cup, which he unfortunately reinvests into the symbolic system of indebtedness, ultimately compells a particular reading of Beowulf's hamartia, and hence of his ultimate tragedy. The fault, or the tragic flaw, may therefore be pointed out to reside not so much exclusively in the character of the hero as an individual man, but rather in a more communal and societal dimension. I would like to approach the poem from that particular angle, which does not at all imply a cultural study of the context, but simply a particular analysis of the text itself. For my suggestion happens to be corroborated, I think, by a cursive survey of those elements of the poem which have sometimes been called digressive, and which are really those textual hinges, when the scop swerves off from a diegetic telling of his story (as for instance to mention the thirteenth retainer). Thematic and structural links may be brought to light by a diachronic reading, which make for what I consider like a performative depth and momentum of the poem.

Worldly Men and Pious Women: The Rise of a Double Standard in Colonial Connecticut

Worldly Men and Pious Women: The Rise of a Double Standard in Colonial Connecticut Kathleen M. Brown (bio) Cornelia Hughes Dayton. Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. xviii + 382 pp. Figures, maps, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95. In 1763, twenty-four-year-old Ephraim Keith, Jr. sought the counsel of lawyer Robert Treat Paine about a paternity suit being brought against him. Keith, a Harvard graduate and student of the law, was the son of a justice of the peace and a member of a prominent family. By eighteenth-century standards, he was a young man with bright prospects. Finding himself charged with paternity, however, Keith appears to have seriously considered jettisoning both his studies and his ties with family and friends to escape legal trouble until persuaded by Paine to settle the suit out of court. In addition to offering sage advice and legal counsel, Paine agreed to smooth the way with Ephraim’s father, urging the son to make apology and a pledge of “repentance and future good Behavior” to the elder Keith (p. 227). Describing Ephraim’s tragic flaw as that of being “too handsome,” Paine explained the son’s moral lapse to the father as the victimization of “a poor inoffensive inexperienced Youth,” who, like Joseph of Old Testament fame, risked being ruined at the hands of a cunning seductress. Thanking Paine, Ephraim sounded less like a chastened prodigal than a worldly wise rake amused by the parochialism of his lover and her community. “It is needless for me to Describe the Perplexities and Embarrassments I laboured under with a Brace of Bailiffs at my Heels and all merely for the Peccadillo of begetting my own Likeness” (p. 228). At first glance, Keith’s “Embarrassments” appear tangential to Cornelia Hughes Dayton’s Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789. Keith was living in Massachusetts when he became the target of a paternity suit, whereas Dayton concerns herself mainly with the jurisdiction of New Haven Colony (later New Haven County) and the colony of Connecticut. The documents generated about Keith’s legal trouble, moreover, contain very little information about the young woman pregnant with his child [End Page 37] whereas Dayton’s focus is upon “the many women who entered early Connecticut courtrooms: women suing and being sued over debt and slander, women petitioning for divorce, women prosecuted for sexual transgressions, women advancing rape charges” (p. 2). Yet the contending interests represented by Keith, his lover, and his lawyer, if not the precise details of the incident, create the dynamic tension that pervades Dayton’s history of law and society in colonial Connecticut. Arguing that an expanding commercial economy, a growing conformity with English common law, and the bourgeois sensibilities of the colony’s rising merchant and professional classes contributed to erode the Puritan legal ethos of the seventeenth century, Dayton traces the emergence of the legal culture that replaced it. She identifies several trends that framed the choices open to Keith, his lawyer, and his anonymous lover: the increasing ability of young men to avoid public trials and punishments for sexual misconduct that would have been de rigeur during the seventeenth century; the growing likelihood that mothers of illegitimate children, particularly if they were Indian, African, or of the lower classes, would come to shoulder the entire burden of public punishment; and the rise of a predominantly male legal culture, based on knowledge of technical legal maneuvers and with strong ties to English common law traditions, which supplanted the Puritan courtroom’s emphasis on confession and morality. Dayton contends that the calculated choices made by individual women and men were not simply acted out against a distant backdrop of legal constraint, however, but rather were integral to the process through which eighteenth-century legal culture was created. Her insistence that women as well as men engaged in dynamic interactions with the law (and with each other through the law) to produce this legal culture enlivens her account of changing litigation patterns and standards of evidence. Eschewing the sampling techniques that provide only truncated glimpses of...

Governing Without Passion: Willard's Call for a Rhetoric of Competence

Charles Willard has taken turn his scholarship. In Liberalism and Problem of Knowledge, he uses his theorizing on argument fields to critique liberalism and propose new for modern democracy. This new rhetoric is a move away from one discourse, liberalism, to different discourse, (p. 3). In advocating this rhetorical substitution, Willard grounds his case consequences of passion. He argues democracy would be better served by cool discourse of epistemics than by provocative language of liberalism. In building his case, Willard spins two tales. The first I will call Story. This tale is nightmare. It is vision of tyrannical Rousseau contemporary times. He is firing flames of ethnic, religious, and nationalist hatreds name of political authenticity. In all its particulars, Rousseau Story is tragedy. The human quest for community is tragic flaw. Historic peoples, Willard reports, recovering their rich cultural heritages by slaughtering their neighbors - Azerbaijan, Slovenia, Croatia, Moldova, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and further afield, Angola, Burundi, Rawanda, Zaire, Turkey, Sudan, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Paua New Guinea. Identity, apparently, abhors vacuum, and when people set out to fill this void, they often fill it with corpses (p. 3). The Rousseau Story is familiar. It is old tale of melting pot anxiety. The melting pot is supposed to protect American society from importation of old-world hatreds. Yet, nagging at liberal mind is fear without these sources of identity hedonistic individualism will take root. Americans without roots will become more consumers than citizens. The resultant loss of cultural identity will lead citizens to search for authenticity their politics. Willard offers as representative anecdote Hillary Rodham Clinton's call for politics of meaning. She cries for America to awake from a sickness of soul; she says material well-being is not enough, that we lack at some core level meaning our individual lives and meaning collectively; she describes us as crippled by alienation and despair and hopelessness; and she prescribes redefinition of what it means to be human being twentieth century, moving into millennium (p. 40). Unfortunately, this humane undertaking eventually feeds on most convenient sources of identity - religion, ethnicity, nationalism, and race. The hunger for community and authenticity is slippery slope to balkanization. The second tale I call Story. This tale is less frightening than first, but it is less narrative of dysfunction. The drama is set against of modem welfare state. The complexity of scene means no single intelligence can grasp competing expert claims about its condition; no panoptic, overarching point of view is available to tie all loose ends together (p. 5). This story is about failed liberal attempts to graph the problem of and resultant lesson of states blunder rather more than they should and why their decisions are often less rational than we would like (p. 5). The Incompetence Story is comedy. The buffoonish characters at play's outset - disciplinary experts, policy analysts, politicians, and woefully unprepared public - act out Keystone Cops' attempt at governing. They communicate babble of incommensurable discourses. As action proceeds, however, these disparate actors find political Esperanto, discourse of epistemics. In end, babble of tongues becomes translatable as these travelers from various different knowledge fields begin to talk reasonably to one another. The Incompetence Story is also familiar. I first encountered variation of it Daniel Bell's End of Ideology. Bell (1962), writing at end of fifties, proclaims in West, among intellectuals, old passions are spent. …

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WHEN THE LIMITS ARE NOT THEIR OWN: WHY THE ELDERLY MUST PARTICIPATE IN HEALTH CARE REFORM

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