bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Rashōmon
Authors: Tokarska-Bakir Joanna
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins by explaining how the term “Rashōmon effect” perfectly describes the reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom events, which—despite the abundance of sources—continues to be unattainable. Representatives of all the uniformed services present at 7 Planty Street on that day presented perspectives that were favorable solely to themselves. Their statements mutually contradict one another, and it is impossible to merge them into a cohesive narrative. While according to some calculations, up to a quarter of all Kielce residents could have taken part in the pogrom, the response of the majority initially spoke about the pogrom using such terms as “burden,” “dishonor,” and “stigma.” With time, however, as the victims left the city and the pogrom investigations waned, even the pogromszczycy whose guilt had been proven learned to deny everything. The chapter outlines the timeline of the events on Planty Street before considering four newly discovered, subjective perspectives: the account of the first Jew who was detained, Kalman Zinger, accused of kidnapping Henio Błaszczyk; the demobilized soldier, Rachmil Tajtelbaum, who saw Zinger being arrested; and Gerszon Lewkowicz, who was in the Jewish Committee and who will tell about the aftermath of Zinger's arrest. It summarizes these three accounts using recently discovered archival materials, specifically, notes taken by Adolf Berman, the chairman of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, about the course of the entire day.
The Military Men
Authors: Tokarska-Bakir Joanna
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the role of the Polish Army during the Kielce pogrom. The Freedom and Independence Union (WiN) reports described the attitude of the army toward the civilian population, particularly the rural segment, as strange. On the one hand, soldiers protected them from attacks; on the other, they themselves plundered, taking not only food but also clothing and money. The reason for this state of affairs was demoralization and hunger in units that did not receive food in sufficient quantities and on time. The chapter looks at Stanisław Kupsza, Kazimierz Konieczny, and Antoni Frankowski. Counteracting the pogrom was within the scope of Kupsza's responsibility as head of the Provincial Security Committee, which was supposed to coordinate the various armed forces throughout the city in the event of unexpected threats or attacks from the underground. At first, however, Kupsza made light of the pogrom. Only later did he send ten gendarmes to Planty Street, as well as Wasyl Markiewicz, head of the engineering service for the division. The chapter also considers the military documentation signed by Kazimierz Konieczny, the deputy head of the 2nd Infantry Division, which completely omits the confiscation of the Jewish residents' weapons.
Performing Black Lives
Authors: Ameh Elaigwu P.
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights the struggle in responding as a theater scholar and Black man working in higher education to both the pandemic and to Black Lives Matter. For the author, the need to respond within his college became even more urgent when a Black resident of the predominately white town where Grinnell College is located was gruesomely murdered in a very public manner. The chapter highlights Ameh's student-centered online and in-person process of creation, which resulted in a series of spoken word experiences that was also the college's first mainstage production with an entirely Black cast, Black director, Black playwright, and student director. The chapter discusses the author's Project X, which he used as a response to the question of what it means to be an arts-based publicly engaged scholar of color in the time of COVID-19. Project X serves as a reminder of the repellent images of racial inequities that still plague society.
Epilogue
Authors: Hart Judy
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers the Women's Rights National Historical Park as a fine example of history changing. It recounts individuals, such as Judy Hart, who worked on the park proposal in 1978 and believed it accurate to say that the 1848 convention was the first women's rights convention and that the convention began the women's rights movement. It also talks about the power of the story of the women's rights movement that allowed the nonconforming sites to fight their way into the National Park Service. The chapter reviews the theme for the annual Convention Days celebration for 2022, “The Abolitionist Roots of the Women's Movement,” which enrich the interpretation of the Women's Rights National Historical Park. A significant change in the use of the Women's Rights Park includes the designation of two free speech sites: one in Declaration Park and one at the Stanton house.
We Who Are Here Can See and Know
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights Lyman Eppes' stay in North Elba for six years that implies the disappearance of some animals in the wild, such as the Adirondack beaver that faced extinction and wolves that were becoming more memory than threat. Lynx, wolverines, and fishers were sighted only rarely, salmon were getting scarce, and dams and mills had slowed stretches of the Saranac and Ausable rivers from a wild gallop to a crawl. The chapter points out how deer, now facing fewer predators, were bearing up pretty well in Eppes's part of Essex County. As long as the illusion of abundant Adirondack wildlife saturated dispatches from the region and brought sportsmen by the coach full, Eppes could not complain.
I Begin to Be Regarded as an “American Citizen”
Authors: Godine Amy
Published: May 2024

This chapter highlights Isaac, Isaac Jr., George, and Freeman, who moved their families from Vermont to the northern New York wilderness and made their homes in Franklin. Vermonters followed Isaac, Isaac Jr., George, and Freeman and called their settlement Vermontville. The chapter discusses how clusters of Black families from New York and beyond forged a frontier culture of marked social and cultural diversity. The chapter mentions the Adirondack lumberman, Thomas Goldsmith, who paid Gerrit Smith a dollar an acre for a wide tract of densely wooded land on the Saranac River in southeastern Franklin County. When Goldsmith fell behind on taxes, New York sold his fourteen-thousand-acre property to a long-distance buyer at auction, and it took years before Goldsmith learned of this in 1864.
The Fear of Poetry (1940, 1941)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the breakdown of communication during the war and the role of poetry in resolving it. Is there a place for poetry? What is its use? The author asserts that if communication has broken down, it is time to tap the roots of communication. Poetry is written from those depths. The author then explains that the history of the self-control of nations is the history of civilization. It is that control that gives us our traditions, and poetry is communication self-controlled, turning its powers according to the laws of the spirit. Ultimately, the author claims that the refusal to face the conflict is the fear of poetry.
Poetry and Peace (1940)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on the role of poetry in times of peace. It begins by looking at the efforts toward a conscious social poetry, which have been full of images of war and waste. It was never a true movement but there was a small structure that developed its own rules and rulers much too soon. When the Imagists first began to publish, it was a revulsion away from suspense, a very civilized wish not to give in to ritual impatience, not to be carried away and broken down by the horror and pity and self-pity that the press and writing in general collapse into in years like 1917 and 1940. The author explains how the term “school of poetry” presupposes a level of civilization, a centralization of forces, a benevolence of rule, and an expansion of the state in which it occurs. The chapter then considers censorship and hush-editorials. Ultimately, the author suggests that the worst thing that would happen to poetry, except to neglect it altogether, would be for it to become an occasional poetry of war.
The Music of Translation (1971)
Authors: RuKeyser Muriel
Published: May 2024

This chapter assesses the process of translation. The author explains that as children, it seems that we have all come to translations in the same way that we came to the writings in English. Feeling our way into something that had happened in France, knowing that the Asian languages were far outside and the collision of the strokes of meaning made as if pictures. All of these are “as if” because the physicality of what we are coming to is perhaps not a physicality as if we are coming to the work entire, to ourselves entire, and to something that is named. The chapter then considers how translators are often called traitors.
Courtly Love as Sexual Script
Authors: Leach Elizabeth Eva
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks into courtly love as a sexual script. It explains that the notion of courtly love was originally an unreliable English translation of Gaston Paris's 1883 use of “amour courtois” to designate what he saw as a new kind of erotic relations in Chrétien de Troyes's Chevalier de la charette. The prevalence and definition of the term were only expanded by C.S. Lewis who viewed courtly love as being defined by characteristics of humility, courtesy, adultery, and religion of love. The chapter also discusses the idea of sexual scripting as a means of linking literary analysis to everyday experience. It also considers the specific role of singing in facilitating these uses of courtly songs as a sexual script.
Sexual Scripts in D308’s Grands Chants and Sottes Chansons
Authors: Leach Elizabeth Eva
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the sexual scripts in D308's grand chants and sottes chansons. It explains the sotte chanson and Marian song as extending the field of sexual scripting offered by song culture into more niche and non-normative but still available sexual practice. Both sottes chansons and Marian songs have been viewed as parodying the courtly love tradition since both types imitate formal aspects of the grand chant, while transforming its content. The chapter cites that scholarly orthodoxy views the necessary literary code of the high-register grand chant as the indispensable reference point for both Marian songs and the sottes chansons. It mentions the perspectives regarding all songs at court providing cultural scripts for sexual and social behaviors.
Successful Forgeries
Authors: Cooper David L.
Published: May 2024

This chapter explains how epic poems of the Queen's Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts became integrated into the Czech national myth. Both manuscripts were able to meet the demand of an eager public with their convincing simulation of ancient Slavic poetry. The chapter offers an analysis of Czech manuscripts while referencing John Miles Foley's revision of oral-formulaic theory that focused on the South Slavic, Homeric, and Old English epic traditions. The manuscripts were not as pervasively formulaic as their models, but still much closer to those models than to contemporaneous literary poetry in the degree of lexical repetitiveness. The chapter cites how the forgers struggled to simulate the existence of formulaic epic tradition.
Histories of Ownership
Authors: Warburton Eve
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the development of Indonesia's political economy according to prevailing patterns of ownership in each sector and the status of nationalist policymaking. It clarifies that the roots of nationalist agitation and the evolution of ownership are vital to the understanding of contemporary patterns of resource nationalism. Dutch colonizers and Japanese occupiers organized foreign private and state ownership and exploitation of Indonesian land and resources. Following Indonesia's revolution, the newly independent and democratic government grappled with pressure to localize the resource-based economy while facing massive economic constraints. The chapter then details the authoritarian New Order government's approach to foreign investors in the land and resource industries.
Private Nationalism and State Developmentalism
Authors: Warburton Eve
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the key concepts of private nationalism and state developmentalism. It then elaborates on the contemporary state–business relations and economic policymaking in Indonesia. Similar to other countries, resource nationalist efforts in Indonesia have often been framed by advocates in the state, political parties, and domestic companies as part of a developmentalist project. The chapter also considers the interplay of resource nationalism and social activism with activism pursuing environmental protection. It explains how booms boost the structural and instrumental power of domestic firms which affect business–state relations and patterns of ownership in a country's precious land and natural resource sectors.
Afterlives of Endor
Authors: Levine Laura
Published: May 2024

This book offers an analysis of the way early modern English literature addressed the period's anxieties about witchcraft and theatricality. What determined whether or not a demonologist imagined a trial as a spectacle? What underlying epistemological constraints governed such choices and what conceptions of witchcraft did these choices reveal? Pairing readings of demonological texts with canonical plays and poetry, the book examines such questions. Through analyses of manuals and pamphlets about the prosecution of witches—including Reginald Scot's skeptical The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), King James VI/I's Daemonologie (1597), and Jean Bodin's De la Demonomanie des Sorciers (1580)—the book examines the way literary texts such as Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Marlowe's Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus address anxieties about witchcraft, illusion, and theatricality. The book attends to the rhetorical tactics, argumentative investments, and underlying tensions of demonological texts with the scrutiny ordinarily reserved for literary texts.
An Uncertain Future
Authors: Martin-Nielsen Janet
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins with the evaluation of France's polar activities in order to get to the bottom of the Terres australes et antarctiques françaises' (TAAF) persistent funding crises. The report, delivered by Claude Fréjacques and Frédéric Thiriez was damning as it indicated France to be weak in both Arctic and Antarctic affairs for having a polar budget of half or less than that of comparable countries. Fréjacques and Thiriez recommended France to establish a new polar organization to cover both Arctic and Antarctic research. The chapter highlights the plan to link the Arctic and Antarctic in a new polar organization, which was fueled by a trio of reasons: pride, pragmatism, and punishment. Given that all big countries possessed a polar organization covering both the Arctic and the Antarctic, the overseas minister and the minister for research and technology felt that France should follow suit.
Early Russian Liberalism
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter traces the history of Russian liberalism, which began in the second half of the eighteenth century when Enlightenment ideas of reason and progress made their way into Russia. The chapter details how liberalism developed in fits and started as Russian rulers swung back and forth between reform and reaction. The reign of Alexander I is often portrayed as a period of darkest reaction, but some historians date Russian liberalism's origins to this period. The chapter highlights Catherine II's commitment to the principles of liberalism and her Instruction to the Legislative Commission that she summoned in 1767. The Instruction opened the doors in Russia to the liberal ideas of the European Enlightenment.
The Great Reforms
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter recounts the war that broke out between Russia and an alliance of France, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire in October 1853. The war became known as the Crimean War and ended in a humiliating defeat for Russia in March 1856. The chapter details how the Crimean War revealed serious deficiencies in Russia's system and convinced the new emperor, Alexander II, of the need for reform, starting with the abolition of serfdom. The emancipation of the serfs upended the entire system of local government and changed the local administration and the justice system, resulting in a succession of measures that became known as the Great Reforms. The chapter highlights the creation of a new system of local government in the form of elected institutions known as zemstva in 1864 after Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861.
The Era of Counter-Reform
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses how Alexander III's accession to the throne in 1881 introduced a more conservative phase in Russian politics. It outlines the 1890 law, which increased noble representation in the zemstva and the 1892 statute that reduced the autonomy of city councils, which worsened the tension between central and local government. Despite the rapid industrialization, Russia remained an overwhelmingly rural country divided into distinct estates that were subject to different legal rules. The chapter looks at how the severe Russian famine in 1891 convinced many within the liberal community that the state needed to cede more powers to what they called “society.” External problems worsened Russia's domestic situation, causing Liberals to become increasingly radicalized and for Russian liberalism to acquire a revolutionary air.
Revolution and Civil War
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about the workers in Petrograd who protested against food shortages on March 8, 1917. The crisis in Petrograd caused Russian liberals to take the lead in the revolutionary movement in order to steer it in a direction they considered desirable. The chapter mentions how the Provisional Committee of the Duma became the basis for the new Provisional Government and was supposed to govern Russia until a constituent assembly could be convened. The chapter recounts the liberals' first experience of power, which proved to be a disastrous failure as they were forced to readdress many of their core beliefs. The story of Russian political liberalism after the civil war is one of a rapid shift from an idealistic belief in the virtues of democracy to an embrace of military dictatorship.
Emigration
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter details how liberalism disappeared at the end of the Russian Civil War for several decades, both as an ideology and as an organized political movement. A million or so Russians fled the country after the revolution, forming a community known as “Russia Abroad.” The chapter reviews the two main threads of the story of émigré liberalism: the first is the fate of the Kadet party in exile and the second is the intellectual legacy of émigré philosophers and economists. The chapter emphasizes how experiences of revolution, civil war, and exile induced a profound disillusionment with humanity among Russian liberals, many of whom lost their faith in the West as a model for Russia's future. The Bolshevik victory in Russia, the Great Depression, and the rise of dictatorial regimes undermined the positivist view of history as marching inexorably toward liberal democracy.
Perestroika
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about Mikhail Gorbachev, who assumed the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in March 1985. The problems Gorbachev faced were severe as the Soviet economy was slowing, Russia was mired in a war in Afghanistan, and in 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear accident dealt a humiliating blow to Soviet prestige. The chapter reviews Gorbachev's series of unprecedented reforms known as perestroika as the country was verging on crisis. The chapter explores how perestroika touched every aspect of Soviet society and its associated policy, glasnost', reduced, and eventually abolished, censorship. Perestroika had an international dimension, as Gorbachev accepted the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe, and it constituted a far-reaching and rapid process of liberalization.
Conclusion
Authors: Robinson Paul
Published: May 2024

This chapter reviews commonalities across the eras that characterize Russian liberalism and explain its apparent failure as a political movement. It emphasizes how liberalism failed to establish deep roots in the Russian population as they value other things, such as social stability, more highly and have tended to reject liberals even when they do not reject liberalism. It also highlights Russia's failure to dispel the impression that it is a movement of intellectuals whose attitudes are far removed from those of ordinary people as one of the fundamental problems of Russian liberalism. Russian liberalism has long contained a strong element of historical determinism, leading Russian liberals to view history as marching inexorably toward the model of Western liberal democracy. The chapter points out how the invasion of Ukraine marked a historical turning point at which Russia and the West separated themselves from each other once and for all.
People Power
Authors: Watson Vajra M.
Published: May 2024

This chapter talks about Phil Serna, who is in the spotlight as a political figure and as a homegrown leader within the Sacramento community. Early experiences with activism with farmworkers and other organizing groups shaped Phil's career trajectory. The chapter emphasizes how Phil considers it a privilege to serve and is proud to represent one of Sacramento's most diverse constituencies. The chapter pays particular attention to the ways Phil, as a Latino leader, serves as an outspoken and unapologetic champion for Black life and explores his perspective on racial injustice in Sacramento. According to Phil, an effective policy must involve various stakeholders and encompass an intergenerational, multitiered approach in order to take root and solve real-life problems.
The President of Helping and Giving
Authors: Winn Lawrence “Torry”
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores Crystal Harding's job description and why she is committed to serving the Black community of Sacramento. Crystal, like many of her Community Lead Incubator (CIL) colleagues, is very experienced and skilled and is a valuable and integral member of the Sacramento community. As the program director for the North Highlands Foothill Farms Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC), Crystal dedicates her time and resources to the local youth and families of North Highlands, Foothill Farms and surrounding neighborhoods. The chapter emphasizes how Crystal applies the lessons she learned from her journey of ten thousand miles by responding to the needs of the community where she grew up, currently lives, works, prays, and plays. Crystal's natural gift to relate and show compassion for the concerns and needs of others makes it easier for community members to trust her.
There’s Still More to Do
Authors: Gonzalez Heather
Published: May 2024

This chapter traces the history of Sacramento turning its head from the preventable, perpetual, and continual disproportionate death rates afflicting African American babies and youth in areas that the Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC) has aimed to mitigate. BCLC remains affirmed as just and essential to reducing the insidious racial harm woven into the system's very fabric. The chapter mentions Community Incubator Leads (CIL) that were mandated to develop neighborhood-specific strategies to reduce perinatal conditions, unsafe sleep-related outcomes, child abuse and neglect, and third-party homicide. The chapter highlights the documented reduction of mortality rates, which was one of the main indicators of BCLC's success. However, it also emphasizes that more resources, bodies, and support are needed as African American babies and youth continue to die.
British Rule and Omani Marriage in Colonial Zanzibar
Authors: Limbert Mandana
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on British rule and the notion of Omani marriage in colonial Zanzibar. It explores policy debates in Zanzibar that revolve around marriage registration and descent categories. British officials attempted to garner approval from select Arab elite members in Zanzibar or to adjust their policies in response to what they understood would be impolitic. British officials accepted that Arab marriage practices were not determined by racial categories. The chapter highlights how racial thinking remained particularly resilient amidst debates and discussions. It mentions how some of the Swahili-speaking Arab elite and the Arabian Peninsula benefited from British policies that treated them as the island's protected community.
Reflections on Art and Nation Building
Authors: Kamal Amr
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) in Doha, Qatar. It looks into the connection between the museum and its representation in Reflections on Islamic Art (RIA) as a multidimensional memory project shaped by culture experts and rulers. The museum and its remediation in RIA mobilize a repertoire of preexisting cartographies and historical narratives belonging to regional and global culture memory. The chapter explains that Qatar attempts to create a continuum between a pan-Arab identity and a pan-Islamic heritage that extends beyond the Arab world while speaking to its contemporary social demographics and its geographical location. It also mentions how Qatar situates itself on a transnational map that ambiguously recognizes its contemporary guest residents and simultaneously erases them.
The Counterhuman Imaginary
Authors: Brown Laura
Published: May 2024

This book proposes that alongside the historical, social, and institutional structures of human reality that seem to be the sole subject of the literary text, an other-than-human world is everywhere in evidence. The book's author finds that within eighteenth-century British literature, the human cultural imaginary can be seen, equally, as a counterhuman imaginary—an alternative realm whose scope and terms exceed human understanding or order. Through close readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, along with lapdog lyrics, circulation narratives that give agency to inanimate objects like coins and carriages, and poetry about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the book traces the ways presence and power of the nonhuman—weather, natural disasters, animals, even the concept of love—not only influence human creativity, subjectivity, and history but are inseparable from them. Traversing literary theory, animal studies, new materialism, ecocriticism, and affect theory, the book offers an original repudiation of the centrality of the human to advance an integrative new methodology for reading chaos, fluidity, force, and impossibility in literary culture.
Introduction
Authors: Brown Laura
Published: May 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the notion of the “counterhuman imaginary.” The counterhuman imaginary directly acknowledges the “imaginary” nature of claims of human representation and human authority, in order to discover the “counterhuman” disruptions that are generated out of or alongside those claims through the self-efficacy of the other-than-human. As a disruptive or counterintuitive experience, the counterhuman presents a persistent challenge and opportunity for explication and for methodological innovation. The chapter details that the book looks at affect theory, posthumanism, new materialist theory, and environmental or geohistorical criticism. The book tests the analytical opportunities provided by the notion of the counterhuman imaginary by focusing on a diverse set of influential literary texts from the early eighteenth century in England. It illuminates the status of the counterhuman imaginary at a significant moment in the history of humans, animals, and the geographical and environmental realm—a moment that involves what is often understood as the constitution of human modernity.
The Coalitions Presidents Make
Authors: Mietzner Marcus
Published: May 2024

This book explains how Indonesia has turned its volatile post-authoritarian presidential system into one of the world's most stable. The book argues that since 2004, Indonesian presidents have deployed nuanced strategies of coalition building to consolidate their authority and these coalitions are responsible for the regime stability in place today. In building coalitions, Indonesian presidents have looked beyond parties and parliament—the traditional partners of presidents in most other countries. In Indonesia, actors such as the military, the police, the bureaucracy, local governments, oligarchs, and Muslim groups are integrated into presidential coalitions by giving them the same status as parties and parliament. But while this inclusiveness has made Indonesia's presidential system extraordinarily durable, it has also caused democratic decline. In order to secure the stability of their coalitions, presidents must observe the vested interests of each member when making policy decisions. The book details the process through which presidents balance their own powers and interests with those of their partners, encouraging patronage-oriented collaboration and disincentivizing confrontation.
The Parties
Authors: Mietzner Marcus
Published: May 2024

This chapter begins with an overview of the powers Indonesian political parties hold vis-à-vis the president. Outside of legislative support, they lie in nominating authority, provision of campaign support, and political protection in times of extra-parliamentary crises. The chapter then outlines the president's instruments to groom, reward, and punish parties. These instruments are mostly drawn from the conventional presidential toolbox outlined in the coalitional presidentialism literature, but include others as well. Among the latter are the offer to parties to benefit from a president's popularity and the unique ability of Indonesian presidents to decide the outcome of intra-party conflicts. The chapter also illustrates how coalitions between parties and presidents are built and maintained. Although there have been a few differences between the Yudhoyono and Widodo periods, some organizing principles have remained the same—such as that nominating parties receive a larger share of the spoils and that presidents only in extreme cases penalize coalition parties. Finally, the chapter offers a case study of the power play between presidents and parties: the nomination of Ma'ruf Amin as Widodo's running mate in the 2019 elections.
Images without End
Authors: McGillen Michael
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores Robert Musil's concept of history. It cites that Musil's use of spatial form is unique in its focus on the creation of images. Musil views the order of history as provisional and defined by contingency, which also resembles a series of chance encounters rather than a teleological path toward a goal. The chapter discusses how the encounter with eschatological thought in the early twentieth century ceased to be tied to its secularization in modern philosophies of history. It also explains how Musil's works explore the literary and aesthetic possibilities for conceiving of the end in spatial terms.
Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination
Authors: Capuano Peter J.
Published: May 2024

This book offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens's use of “low” and “slangular” (his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue (close) reading methodologies, the book considers Dickens's use of bodily idioms—“right-hand man,” “shoulder to the wheel,” “nose to the grindstone”—against the broader lexical backdrop of the nineteenth century. Dickens was famously drawn to the vernacular language of London's streets, but this book is the first to call attention to how he employed phrases that embody actions, ideas, and social relations for specific narrative and thematic purposes. Focusing on the mid-to late-career novels Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, the book demonstrates how Dickens came to relish using common idioms in uncommon ways and the possibilities they opened up for artistic expression. The book establishes a unique framework within the social history of language alteration in nineteenth-century Britain for rethinking Dickens's literary trajectory and its impact on the vocabularies of generations of novelists, critics, and speakers of English.
“Shouldering the Wheel” in Bleak House
Authors: Capuano Peter J.
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines the multiple ways in which crucial developments in Charles Dickens's idiomatic imagination inform how Bleak House (1852–53) achieves some of its most salient and thematically cohesive effects. It begins by arguing that in the process of constructing what is undoubtedly the most powerful beginning to any of his novels, Dickens gradually hits on and then develops this sprawling text's most central imaginative body idiom in conjunction with some of its deepest themes. Dickens in all likelihood began the novel with little idea of how central a role the idiom “shoulder to the wheel” would eventually come to play in his developing novel. However, what is clear is that his earliest thinking about Bleak House began with an emphasis on circularity in general and on wheels in particular. With Bleak House, Dickens no doubt wants not just to critique the failure of Britain's heaving and wildly ineffectual public institutions at mid-century, but he also wants to celebrate the importance of individual and collective “shoulder to the wheel” effort, earnest duty, and responsibility—the only kind that has any chance of gaining traction amid the muddy bureaucracy, selfishness, and chaos of mid-century London life.
Plato's "Letters"
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This book provides a highly literal translation of the Letters, complete with extensive notes on historical context and issues of manuscript transmission. The book's analysis presents a necessary perspective for readers who wish to study Plato's Letters as a work of Platonic philosophy. Centuries of debate over the provenance and significance of Plato's Letters have led to the common view that the Letters is a motley collection of jewels and scraps from within and without Plato's literary estate. This book describes how the Letters was written as a single work, composed with a unity of purpose and a coherent teaching, marked throughout by Plato's artfulness and insight and intended to occupy an important place in the Platonic corpus. Viewed in this light, the Letters is like an unusual epistolary novel, a manner of semifictional and semiautobiographical literary-philosophic experiment, in which Plato sought to provide his most demanding readers with guidance in thinking more deeply about the meaning of his own career as a philosopher, writer, and political advisor. This book not only defends what the author calls the “literary unity thesis” by reviewing the scholarly history pertaining to the Platonic letters but also brings out the political philosophic lessons revealed in the Letters. As a result, the book recovers and rehabilitates what has been until now a minority view concerning the Letters, according to which this misunderstood Platonic text will be of tremendous new importance for the study of Platonic political philosophy.
Letter Two
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter tackles the letter of Plato to Dionysus. Plato writes about Archemedus, who tells him that Dionysus makes an exception for Dion as he rules fiercely over his subordinates. He warns Dionysus about being careful since if his reign ends, the opinion about him will be unfavorable. The chapter showcases how Plato challenges Dionysus to honor his work and philosophy while referencing his reputation in Sicily. It also looks into the warning to keep Plato's letters away from uneducated people to prevent rumors and judgment, so he encourages Dionysus to burn the missive after reading the letter many times.
Letter Four
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks into Plato's letter to Dion the Syracusan. It then explains the importance of being distinguished and acting like it, especially when Dion is watched by all types of people. Plato warns Dion to be careful due to the expectation that Dionysus was done with him, so his affairs will come to ruin on account of Heraclides and his love of honor. The chapter mentions that Plato admitted to hearing a lot of information but not exactly understanding and knowing the situation. Plato also reminds Dion that they lack proper courtesy while highlighting that stubbornness dwells within loneliness.
Plato in Syracuse
Authors: Helfer Ariel
Published: May 2024

This chapter overviews Plato's activities in Syracuse. It starts with the core theme of Letters about Plato's failed attempt to carry out Dion's plan of educating Dionysius to philosophy. The failure essentially resulted in Plato's fateful decision to involve himself in the political affairs of the Syracusan tyranny. The chapter highlights how Plato never believed in Dion's vision for a regime of philosophic rule in Syracuse and that he could never have been sanguine about Dionysius's prospects as a student of Platonic philosophy. It then looks into Letter Thirteen of Letters, which contains reflections on the difficulty of ascertaining the genuineness and authorship of the letter.
Gendered Ambiguities, Hybrid Formations, and the Imaginary of the Body in Achilles Tatius
Authors: Zeitlin Froma I. , Zeitlin Froma I.
Published: May 2024

This chapter assesses Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, the most sex-obsessed of the extant romances and the most provocative. What distinguishes Achilles Tatius' erotics is the body itself as the site of desire and fantasy. The chapter then offers a look beyond the binary of male and female, at what can be called the author's “textual unconscious,” that is, what may be repressed in the narrative, which surfaces only in disguised and symbolic form. While the generic model of erotic symmetry allows for some flexibility in gender roles, it cannot account for those crossovers in which the male either declares himself as playing a female role or reinterprets (misinterprets) sexual difference through his own, not her, experience. Given the masculine orientation of the novel, the imaginary construction of the female body can also serve as a more generic locus of an erotic economy that masks a pervasive anxiety about the effects of consummation and the violation of the body's integrity that finds compensation in the masculine dream of a virginal wholeness into itself.
Machiavelli’s Context
Authors: Lynch Christopher
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses Niccolò Machiavelli's two extended poems, the Decennali or Decennials, which recount fifteen years of Italy's political and military turmoil beginning in 1494. The First Decennial was written as Machiavelli was cultivating his plan to give Florence its own military force, and it was published just as the plan began to bear its first fruits in the form of a public display of four hundred recruits marching in formation in the Piazza della Signoria. The implicit purpose of at least the First Decennial is to so impress readers with Italy's continued vulnerability to foreign invasion as to inspire Florence in particular to form a native militia of its own. These chronicles also make clear how central to Florentine politics were efforts to reacquire Pisa. Written years before he could possibly have known the crucial role he would play in the Florentine victory, the First Decennial repeatedly mentions efforts to retake Pisa as a barometer of the fortunes of Florence. The Decennials thus provide a condensed sketch of the period leading up to the summit of Machiavelli's military achievement, the reconquest of Pisa, at the same time displaying the weakness of Italian arms, and of Florentine arms, in particular.
Unseen Enemy
Authors: Lynch Christopher
Published: May 2024

This chapter reviews the narrative frame of Niccolò Machiavelli's Art of War. It considers how Machiavelli's chief difficulty as a writer is prefigured by the difficulties of the work's chief interlocutor, Fabrizio Colonna, the mercenary captain. Contrary to appearances, the Art of War is a carefully ordered whole and the ordering principle is the highly suggestive distinction between visible and invisible enemies and the equally suggestive identification of Fabrizio's difficulty with Machiavelli's. Machiavelli at least playfully presented or proposed some kind of war against the unseen but always feared God of the Bible. That Machiavelli conceived of his literary activity as intellectual warfare is suggested by his emphasis on war against an unseen enemy, his army's perpetual orientation to the symbolic home of the biblical God, its captaincy-in-speech by the young friends of his own literary circle, and by the movement of the army ever deeper into Eastern lands for a war of indefinite duration.
For Matrimony or Alimony?
Authors: Griffith Luke
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks into the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) endgame as per the decisions of President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union's General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. The INF Treaty reflected the balance of power in the late Cold War, especially when Gorbachev wanted to stop the arms race to reform the Soviet system. Additionally, the Reagan administration balanced resolve and flexibility, so President Reagan utilized personal diplomacy to engage the Soviet leadership. The chapter details how US and Soviet officials finalized the details of the INF Treaty wherein conventional missiles were folded into the agreement. It explains that Reagan rebelled against orthodox nuclear strategy and embraced Gorbachev.
Epilogue
Authors: Griffith Luke
Published: May 2024

This chapter tackles the impact of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty from the incumbency of George H. W. Bush to Donald Trump. The INF Treaty died on February 2, 2019, when President Trump triggered the six-month notification to revoke the deal. The INF Treaty died for several reasons, which include the Putin government's violation of the agreement to deploy about one hundred SSC-8s. The chapter cites that American policymakers of the Biden administration and its successor can employ lessons from the INF Treaty negotiation to constrain Russian and Chinese ground-based intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles. Regardless of the American approach, US officials should anticipate slow progress during bilateral talks with Russia and China.
Introduction
Authors: Drexler Elizabeth F.
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides a background on the creation and persistence of impunity for a Cold War genocide and subsequent state violence in the name of development and stability in Indonesia. This impunity persists in the realms of law, culture, and common sense, and involves the dehumanization and eradication of political opponents. It explains that impunity involves many forms of violence, complicity, and complacency and produces subsequent generations that both know and unknow about past state violence. The chapter explores why truth telling and factual revelation have not succeeded in redressing human rights violations. It critiques a foundational belief that the documentation of history and past state crimes prevent their recurrence.
The Red Thread
Authors: Drexler Elizabeth F.
Published: May 2024

This chapter looks at the demands for legal justice that shift and evolve, from naming shaming and the call for legal justice to a more affective, embodied, and aesthetic practice that engages youth. It describes the silent protest called Kamisan at the state palace in Jakarta and in other Indonesian cities that demands justice for victims of state violence. As it has continued over more than ten years, Kamisan has created a stage for new aesthetic and affective responses to injustice, demonstrated ongoing impunity, and unified some polarized victims' groups and cases. The chapter considers Kamisan as a model for understanding how the history of state violence appears in repetition and connection of different events, past and present. Shifting attention from the past to the present makes the acts and elements that create the infrastructure of impunity visible, specific, and contingent.
Declarations of Interdependence
Authors: Snyder Holly
Published: May 2024

This chapter analyzes the well-known but complex case of Ezekiel Hart, who was refused by Lower Canada's Legislative Assembly to take his seat in that body, despite having been elected. Although Hart's Jewishness ostensibly kept him out, it demonstrates that the outcome of the election was not purely an expression of attitudes about Jews and their status. The chapter considers political allegiances and interpersonal alliances as a significant force for making Jewishness a vulnerability but not an initial deciding factor in disenfranchisement. It places the case in a broader perspective by framing it as part of the rights of Jews in English political thought and legal practice. It also reveals the parallels and links between Jews and Catholics in the British Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Toward Non-importation
Authors: Fichter James R.
Published: May 2024

This chapter covers the struggles to achieve non-importation of tea. It explains how tea parties were part of an ongoing struggle to control the harbor front and stop tea importation. In November and December 1774, committees began to enforce non-importation and merchants submitted, but tea consumption continued in various regions. Dockside protests against tea imports simultaneously revealed colonial disapproval of Parliament and the Patriots needed to continue stopping tea because colonists still liked it. The chapter cites that the notion of impending boycott encouraged colonists to stock up and Dutch tea was smuggled continuously into the colonies. It also considers the fiction of the legal distance between the committee and the crowd.
The Drink of 1776
Authors: Fichter James R.
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides an overview of how the value of tea as a symbol of Patriot resistance waned after the war in 1775. The war even hollowed out the ban on British tea and British goods, but consuming British tea and manufactured goods was allowed, provided those goods were captured from the enemy rather than traded for. The chapter explains that one of the consequences of concluding the tea prohibition was the sale of the East India Company's tea in Charleston. In 1776 and 1777, the East India Company's tea helped Patriots pay for the war. The chapter highlights how tea prices rose even before wartime inflation set in, partly because of the shortages of supply brought on by Patriot action.
Selling the Future
Authors: Moran Ryan
Published: May 2024

This book explains how the life insurance industry in Japan exploited its association with mutuality and community to commodify and govern lives. Covering the years from the start of the industry in 1881 through the end of World War II, the book describes insurance companies and government officials working together to create a picture of the future as precarious and dangerous. Since it was impossible for individual consumers to deal with every contingency on their own, insurance industry administrators argued that their usage of statistical data enabled them to chart the predictable future for the aggregate. Through insurance, companies and the state thus offered consumers a means to a perfectible future in an era filled with repeated crises. Life insurance functioned as an important modernist technology within Japan and its colonies to instantiate expectations for responsibility, to reconfigure meanings of mutuality, and to normalize new social formations (such as the nuclear family) as essential to life. Life insurance thus offers an important vehicle for examining the confluence of modes of mobilizing and organizing bodies, the expropriation of financial resources, and the action of disciplining workers into a capitalist system.