bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The apprehensive suffix
Authors: Dixon R. M. W.
Published: November 2022

Like most other Australian languages, Dyirbal has both nominal and verbal means of drawing attention to something which may have negative consequences. The aversive case on nominals was described in chapter 3; for example ‘You’d better hide policeman-aversive’ (‘for fear of the policeman’).The present chapter deals with the apprehensive suffix to verbs. A verb marked as apprehensive is normally used in the second clause of a two-clause coordination and refers to something which may happen and would be unwelcome. For example, ‘Don’t go there the policeman see-apprehensive you’ (‘lest the policeman see you’). The apprehensive suffix appears at first sight to be an inflection. However, it can be followed by dative case; it behaves as something of a hybrid, part way between an inflection and a nominalisation.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Unbearable Intimacy
Authors: Battersby Doug
Published: November 2022

Chapter 1 considers Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction in light of his own understanding of the history of the novel form, highlighting the importance he places on the technical innovations of Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. Though Nabokov regarded Ulysses (1922) as the definitive modernist novel, he also criticized its use of stream of consciousness narration, firstly for presenting thoughts and feelings as more linguistic than they ‘really’ are, and secondly for presupposing an objective perspective from which a character’s experience might be neutrally ‘recorded’. This suspicion of modernist narration’s putative affectation of objectivity is apparent in Nabokov’s own derangements of interior monologue and free indirect narration in Ada or Ardor (1969), his most formally ambitious and ethically provocative novel. Other critics have approached Ada as a dramatization of the processes by which the mind gradually comes to know the world in ever more detail. By contrast, a more formally attentive and affectively attuned close reading demonstrates that its experiential descriptions are so saturated with particularities of emotion, fantasy, and desire as to be irreconcilable with conceptually consistent epistemological accounts of this kind. The chapter concludes by assessing Nabokov’s contribution to late modernism and elaborating on the implications of a revised understanding of the philosophical charge of Nabokov’s aesthetics for ethical readings of his fiction, suggesting that his perversion of Flaubertian and Joycean techniques recalibrates the assumption, often propagated by modernist forms, of the inherent virtue of being intimate with another person’s thoughts, feelings, and desires.
John Banville’s Performance of Passion
Authors: Battersby Doug
Published: November 2022

Chapter 4 argues that John Banville’s contribution to late modernism resides in his playful exploitation of the modes of reading and interpretation taught to readers of postwar fiction by modernism’s signature techniques, encouraging us to see in every inflection of style a potential revelation of concealed feeling or desire. His lamentation that postwar novelists have followed Samuel Beckett into experimentalism notwithstanding, Banville’s understanding of the history of the novel is archetypally late modernist—like Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, he venerates Ulysses (1922) whilst expressing doubts about the verisimilitude of its interior monologues. No less late modernist is Banville’s preoccupation with the representability of affective experience, the elusiveness of the past, and the performative inauthenticity of the self. What is distinctive, this chapter suggests, is the characteristically equivocal tone of his narrations, which so often leave us uncertain if emotion is being sincerely expressed or archly performed at our expense. This tonal balancing act is most brilliantly executed in Ancient Light (2012), a novel in which the narrator’s grief for his dead daughter troublingly mingles with recollections of a teenage affair with his best friend’s mother, and where evocations of loss always threaten to metamorphose into the burlesque. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that, because of their eschewal of experimentalism, Banville’s exquisitely crafted novels ultimately lack the paradigmatic force of Nabokov’s or Beckett’s and seem unlikely to catalyse new formal innovations in the twenty-first century—unlike those of his contemporary, J. M. Coetzee, the subject of the next chapter.
Conclusion
Authors: Battersby Doug
Published: November 2022

The conclusion highlights how Troubling Late Modernism recalibrates our understanding of modernist narrative techniques, showing them to be far more ethically fraught than other historians of postwar modernism, who have celebrated their ethical or political efficacy, have supposed. This analysis of the darker emotive uses of modernist aesthetics might be extended in future work either by exploring high modernist writers’ own hesitations about the affective power of the techniques they developed or by appraising whether the use of those techniques in more conventionally realist contemporary fiction amounts to a domestication of their most troubling qualities. The conclusion also elaborates on the wider contribution of the book’s engagement with debates about method, emphasizing how a more experiential approach to close reading reveals Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, John Banville, J. M. Coetzee, and Eimear McBride to be more philosophically challenging writers than the ubiquitous epistemological accounts of their fiction would have us believe. After reflecting on the book’s contribution to affect studies, the conclusion closes with the suggestion that its greater advocacy is ultimately for a more aesthetically generous and pragmatic approach to critical method, capable of reorienting criticism of modernist fiction towards what matters most—the experience of reading such troublingly compelling prose.
Homer in Wittenberg
Authors: Weaver William P.
Published: November 2022

Homer in Wittenberg draws on manuscript and printed materials to demonstrate Homer’s foundational significance for educational and theological reform during the Reformation in Wittenberg. The first study of Melanchthon’s Homer annotations from three different periods spanning his career, and the first book-length study of his reading of a classical author, it offers a new perspective on the liberal arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and textual authority in the Renaissance and Reformation. Melanchthon’s significance in the teaching of the liberal arts has long been recognized, but Homer’s prominent place in his educational reforms is not widely known. Homer was instrumental in Melanchthon’s attempt to transform the university curriculum, and his reforms of the liberal arts are clarified by his engagements with Homeric speech, a subject of interest in recent Homer scholarship. Beginning with his Greek grammar published just as he arrived in Wittenberg in 1518, and proceeding through his 1547 work on dialectic, Homer in Wittenberg shows that teaching Homer decisively shaped Melanchthon’s redesign of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Melanchthon embarked on reforming the liberal arts with the ultimate objective of reforming theological education. His teaching of Homer illustrates the philosophical principles behind his use of well-known theological terms, including sola scriptura, law and gospel, and loci communes. Homer’s significance extended even to a practical theology of prayer, and Wittenberg scholia on Homer from the 1550s illustrate how the Homeric poem could be used to exercise faith as well as literary judgment and eloquence.
Introduction
Authors: Weaver William P.
Published: November 2022

Philip Melanchthon’s use of the label “the Homeric poem” to describe the Iliad and Odyssey occasions this study of reception. The introductory chapter outlines the major themes of the book. First, Melanchthon’s teaching of Homer uniquely illustrates his influential theory of rhetoric or “speech rhetoric.” Second, Melanchthon and his colleagues developed an ancient tradition of exegetical scholarship. Finally, reading Homer was integral to theological instruction at the University of Wittenberg, especially in matters of practical theology. The unity of the Homeric poem is not a literary or formal unity, but a prudential unity, realized in acts of reading that include comparison, recollection, translation, paraphrase, and ultimately imitation.
Homeric Prudence
Authors: Weaver William P.
Published: November 2022

Student notes from Melanchthon’s 1523 lectures on the Iliad illustrate his central aim in teaching Homer: to train students in literary and moral judgment, and to make them competent to enter government service and the ministry. Eloquence and its “shadow” prudence (probity of literary and moral judgment) were the main objectives of reading Homer. In Erasmus’s Adages and Macrobius’s Saturnalia, Melanchthon found models of literary scholarship that could counter scholastic modes of inquiry and textual commentary. Adages or proverbs and topics of invention drawn from rhetoric and dialectic were instrumental in training for practical wisdom and eloquence.
Epilogue
Authors: Weaver William P.
Published: November 2022

It required faith to read the Homeric poem in Wittenberg—not necessarily Christian faith, or even faith in God, but a certain faith in the text. In some verses written for private audiences, Philip Melanchthon gave expression to his faith in the Homeric poem as well as the Christian God. George Herbert’s poem “The H. Scriptures 2” describes a similar faith and may reflect a distant legacy of Melanchthon’s reading of Homer. Melanchthon drew on Homer and Homer scholarship to transform public oratory as well as reading practices in the Reformation. Declamations from the last two decades of Melanchthon’s life suggest a Homeric influence on prayers offered up in the academic assembly.
Telling America's Story to the World
Authors: Stecopoulos Harilaos
Published: November 2022

Telling America’s Story to the World argues that state and state-affiliated cultural diplomacy contributed to the making of postwar US literature. Highlighting the role of liberal internationalism in US cultural outreach, I contend that the state mainly sent authors like Ralph Ellison, Robert Lowell, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Maxine Hong Kingston overseas not just to demonstrate the achievements of US civilization but also to broadcast an American commitment to global intercultural connection. Those writers-cum-ambassadors may not have helped the state achieve its propaganda goals—indeed, this rarely proved the case—but they did find their assignments an opportunity to ponder the international meanings of US literature. For many of those figures, courting foreign publics inspired a reevaluation of the scope and form of their own literary projects. Testifying to the inadvertent yet integral role of cultural diplomacy in the worlding of US letters, works like The Mansion (1959), Life Studies (1959), “Cultural Exchange” (1961, 1967), Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), and Three Days Before the Shooting… (2010) reimagine the literary in a mobile, global, and distinctly political register.
The Good Neighbor Theory of American Literature
Authors: Stecopoulos Harilaos
Published: November 2022

Drawing on long-ignored essays, poems, and radio plays, this chapter demonstrates that the eminent writer and administrator Archibald MacLeish articulated a complex, if often disappointing critique of US power during the early to mid-1940s. I argue that MacLeish sought to resist US jingoism by locating in hemispheric American texts of first contact the source of a new internationalism. A Western humanist, MacLeish did not fully acknowledge the racist violence endemic to European imperialism and colonialism in the Americas, but he did at times define early American literature as a valuable record of intercultural conflict and communication. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to analyses of MacLeish’s controversial essay “The Irresponsibles” (1940) and his multi-lingual radio series The American Story (1944). The chapter ends by connecting these works to MacLeish’s framing of the United Nations as a `new world’ of internationalist possibility in a 1945 speech for Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr.
Coda
Authors: Stecopoulos Harilaos
Published: November 2022

The book ends with a brief account of how 21st century US cultural diplomacy has emphasized multicultural literature. After discussing how the State Department deploys writers of color as literary ambassadors, I focus on how the War on Terror urged government interest in Arab American writers. The remainder of the coda examines how Elmaz Abinader, a Lebanese American writer, found in contemporary US cultural diplomacy a means of forging diverse global ties.
The ‘Social Dimension’ of Postwar Europe
Authors: Andry Aurélie Dianara
Published: November 2022

This first chapter sketches the historical background to the project for a ‘social Europe’ from the Second World War to the 1960s. It outlines the ‘social dimension’—or rather the social deficit—of postwar European unity schemes, which underpinned the exceptional growth of the postwar decades and helped the stabilization of capitalism—a Keynesian type of ‘welfare capitalism’—in western Europe. Although European integration from the Marshall Plan to the European Communities was not a ‘pure’ liberal or free-market process, it bore the mark of Christian democracy and ordoliberalism, of the affirmation of a new international liberal order dominated by the United States, and of a productivist economic model. It was intrinsically anti-communist, and the non-communist European Left scarcely managed to play a role in its genesis.
A New Social Wind
Authors: Andry Aurélie Dianara
Published: November 2022

This chapter re-examines the new social thrust that came to the European Community (EC) at the dawn of the 1970s (1969–72). The first works of the EC on social policy after the Hague Summit showed some will to develop the social activity and image of the EC but did not modify the productivist and market-oriented inspiration of European social policy, nor did it improve the association of labour organizations with European policy making. As western Europe experienced a turn to the left and enlargement to include new members would increase the influence of social democracy within the EC, however, a redefinition of the social goals of ‘Europe’ seemed increasingly plausible. Brandt’s government played a decisive role in this regard in the run-up to the October 1972 Paris Summit, which would mark the apex (perhaps the twilight) of European elites’ new social intentions.
The Defeat
Authors: Andry Aurélie Dianara
Published: November 2022

This chapter investigates the defeat of the European Left’s struggle for a ‘social Europe’ in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It first exposes how, despite some achievements, the European Community (EC) social concern of the early 1970s faded away with the 1974–5 economic recession, the restrictive turn of several governments, and Schmidt replacing Brandt in West Germany. Second, it turns to the failed ‘Eurocorporatist’ attempt to define a new EC-level social compromise. Third, it retraces the unions’ forgotten efforts to take to the streets their demands for an alternative macroeconomic European strategy and for a European reduction of working time. Fourth, it exposes the defeat of the struggle for a democratization of the economy through greater workers’ control of multinational companies. Finally, it shows how the French government’s 1983 decision to abandon its socialist programme in order to remain in the EMS marked the final blow to the European Left’s struggle for a redistributive, planning-oriented, and regulatory ‘worker’s Europe’.
Coda
Authors: Mariani Maria Anna
Published: November 2022

The coda discusses the multiple intersections between nuclear apocalypse and environmental catastrophe. The coexistence of these two potential catastrophes was immediately apparent to Carlo Cassola, one of the Italian writers most active on the disarmament front. The coda analyzes his novel Il mondo senza nessuno (The World without Humans), a text that translates the author’s apocalyptic prophecies into narrative worlds and fuses his antimilitarist mission with a focus on environmental issues. Who are the witnesses to the world’s extinction? The plants. It is the plants who will repopulate the earth and bid farewell to the world before it ends.
Starting Over in Postwar Europe
Authors: Field Geoffrey
Published: November 2022

In October 1945 Wiskemann moved to Rome and lived there for almost two years, writing for the Economist and the Spectator about the birth of the Italian Republic. Her contacts with Italian exiles in wartime Switzerland provided access to leading political and cultural circles. Like most of her friends, she was deeply disappointed by the fragmentation of the anti-fascist Resistance coalition of 1946–47 and the swift decline of the Action party. She also wrote two books on modern Italy; one, The Rome-Berlin Axis (1949), was the first major study of the alliance between Hitler and Mussolini. Work on research projects for Chatham House rekindled her interests in Central and Eastern Europe, especially West Germany, whose policies under Chancellor Adenauer she distrusted and criticized for their failure to fully engage with the nation’s Nazi past. In 1954 Chatham House recruited her to write the first study in English of the expulsion of 12 million Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945–47. Intended as a guide for policymakers, the book gained praise in Britain and North America but fierce opposition in West Germany. Wiskemann’s critique of refugee organizations’ influence on Federal politics and her view that the Potsdam agreements and the Oder–Neisse frontier should be accepted as irreversible, made her the target of an abusive campaign orchestrated by the government, refugee organizations, and research institutes focused on the ‘lost East.’
Minority Governments in Sweden
Authors: Bäck Hanna , Hellström Johan
Published: November 2022

This chapter focuses on governments in Sweden, a country which has a relatively high share of minority governments, over 70 percent, in the post-war period. Most governments formed during this period have been single-party Social Democratic cabinets, supported by one or more parties in parliament, but there have also been several cases of minority coalitions. Swedish politics has historically been characterized by a strong emphasis on a near-unidimensional political conflict along the left–right policy dimension, and a negative parliamentary system which most likely account for the high occurrence of minority cabinets. The chapter describes Sweden as a prime example of what has been called ‘contract parliamentarism’, where minority governments often had support party arrangements in the form of an explicit written contract with one or more opposition parties, publicly committing the partners to a policy agreement. The chapter also shows that minority governments in Sweden have performed well, with a high share of government bills having passed through parliament, a high survival of cabinets, and a high level of electoral support. The legislative successes are partly because of contract parliamentarism but also because opposition parties can gain substantial policy influence via the rather strong parliamentary committee system.
Intellectuals, Masses, and Leaders
Authors: Bonnell Andrew G.
Published: November 2022

Two new sociological concepts came into circulation at the end of the nineteenth century: ‘intellectuals’ and ‘the masses’. These concepts gathered increasing weight in social and political discourse in the early twentieth century. Arguably, the clash between a new organized mass politics of the left, in the form of the socialist labour movement, and attempts by old and new right-wing elites to create a counter-mobilization of other social groups outside the elites themselves, was one of the main factors shaping Europe’s twentieth-century ‘age of extremes’. Michels often reflected on, and saw himself as personally exemplifying, the role of the intellectual in a mass working-class party. One of the aspects of the Italian Socialist Party which Michels found attractive was the prominent role of intellectuals in the party, including many university professors, which would have been impossible in imperial Germany. Michels believed that the involvement of bourgeois intellectuals such as himself in the German Social Democratic Party was proof of their intellectual superiority, whereas workers were motivated more by material gain. Michels increasingly espoused the view that ‘the masses’ were politically incompetent and in need of leaders to whom they could look up, a view that converged with the contemporary ideas of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto.
The Investment Treaty Regime and Public Interest Regulation in Africa
Authors: Dagbanja Dominic Npoanlari
Published: November 2022

Regulatory autonomy inheres in state sovereignty. Legally, it arises out of states’ primary duties to regulate in the public interest which are sourced from national constitutions and general international law. Accordingly, states commonly invoke national constitutions and general international law in defence of measures challenged in investor-state arbitration. The capacity of states to make treaties is equally founded on these legal norms which are necessary for the coming into existence, legal status and juridical consequences of a treaty. The premise of this book, then, is that an analysis of investment treaties and states’ right to regulate must start with the legal and normative limits to states’ capacity to conclude investment treaties. Thus, based on a constitutional-general international law imperatives analysis, this book develops the imperatives theory as a legal and principled framework for explaining the intersection of investment treaties and regulatory autonomy, and the legal status of investment treaties and investor-state arbitration in Africa. It addresses, and answers affirmatively, the a priori question of whether fundamental constitutional and general international law obligations of African states towards citizens place limitations on their competence to conclude investment treaties. It makes a case for the public interest to be prioritised in Africa’s participation in international investment rule-making and for investment treaties to be concluded subject to states’ public interest obligations. This book, a form of resistance towards the investment treaty regime, presents revolutionary perspectives on the necessity, making and reform of investment treaties and investor-state arbitration in Africa with global implications and significance.
The Intersection of Investment Treaty Law and Arbitration and Public Interest Regulation in Africa
Authors: Dagbanja Dominic Npoanlari
Published: November 2022

This chapter introduces the research theme and questions and covers the history of international investment law in Africa, establishing that gaining political independence by African states was central in making investment treaties in Africa. The history of investment treaties in Africa is thus a post-colonial one. This chapter also analyses the standards of investment protection in African investment treaties such as fair and equitable treatment, full protection and security, national treatment, most-favoured-nation treatment, expropriation, repatriation/transfer of investment and returns, and provision for investor–state arbitration. It establishes that the ill-defined nature of the substantive standards is the reason they limit public interest regulation. This chapter reviews investor–state arbitration globally and as it involves African states and analyses fundamental constitutional and general international law rights and corresponding duties of African states. The object, contribution, scope, methodology, and overall structure of the monograph are also covered in this chapter. This chapter thus gives a complete picture of the book in terms of the intersection of the right to regulate under national constitutions and in general international law and investment treaty obligations to protect foreign investment in Africa.
The Right to Development, Development Policy-making and the Investment Treaty Regime in Africa
Authors: Dagbanja Dominic Npoanlari
Published: November 2022

Chapter 5 explores the constitutional and general international law right to development and the adverse effects of investment treaties and investor–state arbitration for development policy-making and implementation in Africa. The chapter establishes that there is a right to development in Africa and a corresponding duty of African states to adopt policies and regulatory measures to ensure the realisation of this right. Although development is claimed to be an objective of the investment treaties, the actual terms of the treaties conflict with the adoption of broader development policies when they adversely affect an investment interest. The reform of investment treaties to accommodate development policy has also been explored in the chapter. This chapter argues that the right to development and corresponding duties to make and implement development policies under national constitutions and international environmental and human rights treaties limits the competence of African states in investment treaty-making and must guide the states in concluding investment treaties, taking into consideration the limitations that the terms of the treaties might place on the autonomy to regulate in discharge of these duties. The chapter makes the case for investment treaties to be reconciled or made consistent with the right to development and corresponding duties of African states.
Introduction
Authors: Miller-Melamed Paul
Published: November 2022

The Introduction poses two questions: why do we emphasize certain historical events more than others, and how does this impact our understanding of the past? Beginning with Bosnian student Bogdan Žerajić’s failure to assassinate Emperor Franz Joseph in 1910, it suggests that this “non act” swerved the course of history just as much as did Gavrilo Princip’s infamous murder of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914. Yet the Sarajevo assassination has been elevated into a “myth” due to its ironic disproportionality to the outbreak of world war a month later—the “first shots of the First World War” in the “uncivilized” Balkans and problematic analogies to contemporary terrorism, for instance. Meanwhile, Žerajić is all but forgotten. Thus, setting out the book’s thematic framework, the Introduction explains its straightforward narrative methodology, in which examples of the “Sarajevo myth” are embedded into a broad overview of the origins of World War I.
Vying Visions
Authors: Miller-Melamed Paul
Published: November 2022

This chapter is framed by the 1908 Bosnian Crisis, when Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina with huge consequences for European alliances, Russian rearmament, Serbian nationalism, and Bosnian student radicalism. It examines Serbian politics/society, including the medieval origins of Greater Serb nationalism and the Kosovo myth. Serbian independence put the nation-state in conflict with Austria-Hungary over the latter’s large south Slavic population. It also helped foster the literary Young Bosnia movement, which protested the oppressive conditions under Habsburg rule despite Austria-Hungary’s economic development of the provinces and Benjamin von Kállay’s effort to create a “Bosnian” national identity. Ideologically, many Young Bosnians embraced Yugoslavism—a south Slavic state independent of Habsburg rule. Habsburg leaders, including Franz Ferdinand through his Military Chancellery, also considered national reorganization to address the South Slavic Question. Indeed, the Bosnian annexation partially strove to convert the Dual Monarchy into a three-part “Trialist” state. Its failure boded ill for Austro-Serb relations.
An “Epic” Conspiracy!
Authors: Miller-Melamed Paul
Published: November 2022

This chapter considers the responsibility question: what group or individual initiated/organized the Sarajevo conspiracy; what motivated them? It breaks the issue into two parts: plot “from above” (Unification or Death, i.e., the Black Hand) or “from below” (Young Bosnians). The chapter argues that the Belgrade “troika” (Princip, Grabež, Čabrinović), driven by their hatred of Habsburg rule, initiated the plot and obtained weapons via an intermediary to the Black Hand. First, however, it situates the conspiracy historically—the alleged belligerency of German Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Balkan Wars (preceded by the Italo-Turkish War). Against arguments that the Black Hand organized the plot for fear of Franz Ferdinand’s federal reforms, this chapter suggests that the weapons handover was motivated by Serbia’s civil-military struggle. Major Vojislav Tankosić, who had close ties to Black Hand leader “Apis,” assisted the Young Bosnians to further the Serb nationalist agenda by overturning the Pašić government.
“World History Is Horrific from Up Close”
Authors: Miller-Melamed Paul
Published: November 2022

This chapter analyzes the events of June 28, 1914, focusing on General Potiorek’s role in the decision to continue the imperial procession (with a slight alteration) after Čabrinović’s failed assassination. It then describes initial reactions to the murder, especially in Austria-Hungary. The book argues that “Sarajevo” was not a “flashbulb” event that traumatized Europeans. Rather, the moment that presaged world war came on July 23, 1914, when Austria-Hungary delivered its impossible Ultimatum to Serbia. Before reaching this climax, the chapter describes the anti-Serb violence after the assassination as well as the diplomatic July Crisis. It breaks the latter into two parts—Serbia’s passive response, led by premier Nikola Pašić; and Austrian Foreign Minister Berchtold’s early decision for war. The delay in delivering the Ultimatum was rooted in Hungarian premier Tisza’s hesitation and lethargic Habsburg military preparations. But the “first shots of the First World War” were fired by Austria-Hungary, not Gavrilo Princip.
Conclusion
Authors: Miller-Melamed Paul
Published: November 2022

The narrative structure of this book is punctured with examples of the “Sarajevo myth”—Princip eating a sandwich when the archduke “happens” to drive up; the role of “fate/chance”; supposedly fatally ill assassins; analogies to contemporary terrorism; the murder’s synonymous relation to Armageddon; assumptions about the role of the “secret” Black Hand “terrorist” society, and so on. In Blaise Cendrars’s radio-play Sarajevo, such so-called myths are considered through two characters who had a minor role in the assassination. Much like this book, the play’s protagonists, who regale tourists on the political murder, seek to get to “the bottom of the matter”—to understand how this single event led to world war. The Conclusion draws on Cendrars’s play to reaffirm that there is no ultimate explanation for this disturbing, ironic history. What does matter, however, is recognizing that the war was decided upon by political leaders rather than Princip’s mythicized pistol shots.
Is Working Longer in Jeopardy?
Authors: Berkman Lisa F. , Truesdale Beth C.
Published: November 2022

Abstract: On average, Americans live longer and healthier lives than they did 50 years ago and substantially longer than when Social Security was created in the 1930’s. Many policymakers and academics think it is logical – almost inevitable – that Americans will spend more of these years in the paid labor force. Longer life expectancies mean that Americans need income to support more years of life, and working longer is a commonly-proposed solution. In this chapter we provide evidence that large and growing economic and social inequalities, coupled with changes across generations or birth cohorts, call for a rethinking of the working-longer policy framework. In the first section of this introduction, we outline trends and inequalities in American demographics, health, family dynamics, jobs, and politics, because the evidence in these five areas – well-known to researchers in those domains but often neglected in the working-longer conversation – is a key motivation for this book. Then we turn to the new frontiers of research on aging, work, and retirement.
Forecasting Employment of the Older Population
Authors: Hurd Michael D. , Rohwedder Susann
Published: November 2022

Abstract: Until the COVID-19 pandemic, the employment rate of the older population had increased for more than 25 years. However, two developments besides the pandemic call into question whether this long-term trend will continue: the employment rate of the younger population has remained constant or declined with the implication that a smaller portion will enter older ages in employment; and health, an important predictor of retirement at the individual level, has not improved in the pre-retirement age population. We use the subjective probability of working at several future ages as stated by individuals in the Health and Retirement Study to assess future employment trends of the older population. We simulate employment from pre-retirement to post-retirement ages, calibrating the level to the population subjective probability of working. The employment rate predicted for those who will be age 70 or 71 in the early 2030s is almost the same as or slightly lower than the level in 2016, implying that, even in the absence of COVID, the positive trend would not continue. Further, most subpopulations as defined by education, gender, and race/ethnicity will not experience growth in the employment rate, not even those with the most favorable trends in health.
Declarations of Emergency
Authors: Vivian Bradford
Published: November 2022

This chapter examines recurrent language choices and narrative frameworks that sources of campus misinformation use to normalize allegations of a free speech crisis in higher education. Public figures and news organizations in the late 2010s attempted to transform hyperbolic portrayals of college campuses into a sustained media campaign rather than consistently responsible, evidence-based deliberation about university teaching and research. The specious premise of a free speech crisis in universities emerged from an elitist echo chamber shaped by circular metadiscourse about college campuses and reactionary nostalgia for prior eras of higher education. Understanding how informational distortion about higher learning thrives in present-day media environments can encourage more constructive dialogues about the challenges of university education today as well as its importance to democratic society.
Orthodoxy
Authors: Vivian Bradford
Published: November 2022

Orthodoxy is the central term of campus misinformation. Various strains of discourse that constitute such misinformation ultimately reinforce the core premise that liberal, progressive, or secular orthodoxy dominates higher education today. This chapter argues that viewpoint diversity polemics about orthodoxy represent a borrowed partisan religious argument dressed in seemingly scientific verbiage. The chapter further contends that the conceit of orthodoxy in campus misinformation constitutes a mode of strategic doublespeak that falsely depicts free political activities and freely chosen ideas as signs of a radical centralized conspiracy. Reactionary political figures have used this doublespeak to generate pretexts for political restrictions of academic freedom across the United States. Counteracting the doublespeak of orthodoxy in campus misinformation is necessary for promoting a superior framework of public debate about higher education while opposing political efforts to restrict academic freedom.
What Is Public Space?
Authors: Low Setha
Published: November 2022

Chapter 2. What Is Public Space? answers the question from a personal, cultural, and urban design point of view. It begins by defining public space by what it does or accommodates and explores the many ways that spaces are made “public” by people, meanings, and practices. The muddled distinction of public/private, however, requires a critical rethinking of the term. An alternative perspective purposes a multidimensional definition based on public space characteristics—physical aspects, ownership, governance or management authority and funding, control and influence, symbolic/historical meanings, and political activity. Public spaces can be scored along various scales (high to low, large to small, open to closed) and then defined by their specific characteristics. A brief review of the prehistory of public space that traces its origins back 12,000 years concludes the chapter by highlighting its significance in early human settlements as well as in the present.
Place Attachment and Cultural Identity
Authors: Low Setha
Published: November 2022

Chapter 8. Place Attachment and Cultural Identity: Monuments, Parks, and Neighborhood Public Space in San José, Costa Rica, and the Statue of Liberty and Battery Park City in New York City identifies place attachment and cultural identity as significant aspects of public space use. Culture-related activities such as music, dance, festivals, and celebrations reinforce cultural values, beliefs, and meanings. The removal of monuments and symbolic icons of an oppressive and violent past—and the struggle over these decisions—is essential to recognizing and respecting all people’s cultural histories and collective memories. Symbolic and material aspects of public space also play a crucial role in a community’s response to a crisis or disaster. The examination of the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty and the post-9/11 use of public space at Battery Park City deepen our understanding of how cultural expressions, identities, and continuity are essential aspects of public space.
Natural Hedonism
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores Epicurean hedonism and its justification. Epicurus considers it obvious that we pursue pleasure and avoid pain by nature, just like every other animal. From the moment of birth, we have a brute desire for secure comfort that never leaves us. In fact, Epicurus thinks our desire for pleasant tranquility motivates our every action. That might strike us as false. We often think we act from a sense of duty or obligation, against what we consider most pleasant. We might also wonder why we are so consistently displeased if, as Epicurus claims, we always pursue the greatest pleasure. Epicurus contends that we choose even unpleasant actions for the sake of long-term pleasure, despite our insistence to the contrary. We fail to achieve stable pleasure because we lack hedonistic prudence, a developed capacity to calculate the short and long-term psychological effects of competing options.
What Do You Want?
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter introduces Epicurus’ taxonomy of desires and explores the relationship between unfulfilled desires and anxiety. Epicurus sorts desires into three categories: those we should embrace as necessary for our life and happiness, those it’s fine to have if we don’t get invested in whether we satisfy them, and those we should cut out of our soul root and branch. In his terms, there are “natural and necessary” desires, “natural and unnecessary” desires, and “unnatural and unnecessary” desires. For current purposes, we will call them necessary desires, extravagant desires, and corrosive desires. Unfortunately, Epicurus himself offers very little in the way of examples, though he does supply some criteria to guide classification. This chapter offers an account of what Epicurus considers necessary for happiness, what he considers desirable but unnecessary for happiness, and what he thinks we should stop desiring altogether.
Why Can’t We Be Friends?
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores the central role of friendship in the Epicurean way of life. Epicurus writes that “of the things which wisdom provides for the blessedness of one’s whole life, by far the greatest is the possession of friends.” Critics, however, claim that Epicurean hedonism precludes genuine friendship because Epicureans enter and leave friendships with their own interests in mind. If friendship requires selflessness, then it seems Epicureans cannot be friends. Critics also claim that an Epicurean will desert a friend who ceases to be pleasant, and genuine friends are not fickle. This chapter offers an Epicurean response to these concerns. It argues that Epicureans are more likely to have stable, long-lasting friendships characterized by trust, support, and intimacy than those who instead pursue friendship from the mistaken conception that they need nothing from others.
Let Me Be Frank
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter introduces the Epicurean commitment to “frank speech,” especially in the context of friendship. Frank speech, done well, involves giving and receiving the kind of constructive feedback necessary for moral or practical improvement. Epicurus acknowledges that we find it painful to have our ethical and intellectual deficiencies brought to light, and he thinks we should not relish causing such pain to others. Given that frank speech requires causing and suffering pain, and hedonists think we avoid pain by nature, the Epicureans need an account of when and how frank speech leads to greater pleasure overall. This chapter explores what it means to “do frank speech well” and why we are often so bad at offering and accepting helpful correction.
Wealth and What It Costs
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores the Epicurean arguments against desiring great wealth. Epicurus acknowledges that money is instrumental to satisfying necessary desires, and he calls what we need for happiness “natural wealth.” Desiring more than natural wealth, however, undermines our tranquility. Epicurus considers the desire for great wealth “corrosive” (in his terms, “unnatural and unnecessary”). Corrosive desires extend without limit—there is always more to want, and a person can never be “too wealthy.” For that reason, corrosive desires cannot be satisfied, and unsatisfied desires put tranquility out of reach. Epicurus also thinks accumulating great wealth usually requires injustice, pandering to the whims of others, and destabilizing one’s community, all of which also undermine tranquility. While Epicurus grants that some people can accumulate wealth justly and preserve their integrity, he thinks they strengthen their well-being by freely sharing their wealth with their community.
Of Sex, Love, and Harmless Pleasure
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores the Epicurean attitude toward sex and love. Epicurus reportedly claimed that he could not make sense of life’s goodness without appeal to sensory pleasures, including the pleasures of sex and of beauty. One of Epicureanism’s advantages is that it does not encourage shame about perfectly natural and harmless desires. Yet many scholars maintain that Epicurus and his followers were in fact opposed to sexual desire, especially romantic love. This anti-sex interpretation seems reasonable considering the many ways that sexual desire can cause harm, ranging from minor embarrassment to jealousy and violence. Nevertheless, we have reason to think Epicurus believed both sexual desire and loving relationships pursued with the proper attitude can produce joys consistent with tranquility. That so many people fail to pursue sex without undermining their tranquility only shows that engaging in harmless sex is rarer than we sometimes recognize.
Experiencing Death
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores the Epicurean approach to death and dying. As a hedonist, Epicurus thinks we are only harmed by experiencing physical and psychological pain. For that reason, Epicurus argues that we should not fear “being dead” because the state of being dead is neither pleasant nor painful. Nevertheless, he recognizes that the process of dying can be painful. While we do not “experience” being dead, we do “experience” the pains of dying, which might seem like a legitimate cause for anxiety that threatens Epicurean tranquility. This chapter explains Epicurus’ argument against the fear of being dead and discusses some common objections to the argument. It also addresses the fear of dying and how Epicurus thinks we can best prepare for and manage the end of life.
Pandemics and Other Comforting Horrors
Authors: Austin Emily A.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores how we should respond, both psychologically and practically, to shared catastrophes like pandemics. Lucretius abruptly ends On the Nature of Things with an account of a virulent plague in Athens, a city he characterizes as wealthy and proud, whose inhabitants are nevertheless secretly anxious, hostile to science, superstitious, and enslaved to their unlimited desires. Lucretius implies that the Athenians would have handled the plague far better had they been Epicureans. Some readers suggest, not without reason, that Lucretius draws a perverse comfort from observing others in the grips of psychological struggles he does not share. Nevertheless, he does seem correct that pandemics and similar crises reveal our underlying values and test our resilience.
Macbeth
Authors: Hudson Benjamin
Published: November 2022

The background to the career of the historical prince Mac bethad begins with his ancestors—immigrant warriors from Ireland who came to Britain. They were violent and tenacious from necessity. They were unwelcome newcomers to northern Britain but found that a fast sword and a little luck could yield a kingdom. As the Scots triumphed over the Picts, they had to face a new foe in the Vikings. When a third enemy, the English, reappeared in the tenth century, it was only one more complication in a dangerous region. But the rewards for success were great: high office, wealth, and prestige. The penalty for failure was simple: death Their struggle over five centuries to survive in a new home eventually allowed them to take supremacy in the lands of northern Britain.
Weird Sisters and the Prior of Loch Leven
Authors: Hudson Benjamin
Published: November 2022

The Macbeth legend that was ultimately used by Shakespeare began with the chronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun, prior of St. Serf’s at Loch Leven. Andrew knew more than one legend about Macbeth, and his inadequacies as an editor permit us to see the various strands. He presents Macbeth in connection with the occult, introducing ethereal ladies, prophecy, and the supernatural. Andrew changed Macbeth from a stereotypical and one-dimensional villain into the hero/anti-hero of the story. He placed Scottish history within the larger context of world history and also wrote in the Scots vernacular, which guaranteed him a large audience. More than any previous writer, Andrew of Wyntoun provided the names of places, character development, historical details, and genealogical information that would be adapted by later interpreters of the Macbeth story. A modern English translation of this episode is given in Appendix 2.
Macbeth and Renaissance Scotland
Authors: Hudson Benjamin
Published: November 2022

Prior to Shakespeare’s drama, Hector Boece, a sixteenth-century principal of King’s College, Aberdeen, and one of the early leaders of the Scottish Renaissance, rewrote the Macbeth episode incorporating the episodes from John of Fordun and Andrew of Wyntoun. His Macbeth was a complicated beast. Part bon vivant, part war hero, but entirely an elusive psychological specimen, this Macbeth was able to command the love and loyalty of many. Equally he was an egotistic, savage tyrant who ruthlessly pursued his own ends. Boece’s history became the basis for Shakespeare’s play. More significantly, his work was used in the intellectual warfare of sixteenth-century Scotland as Protestant and Catholic writers offered their visions of government.