bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cultivating Critical Content Knowledge: Early Modern Literature, Pre-service Teachers, and New Methodologies for Social Justice
Authors: Butler Todd , Boyd Ashley
Published: May 2020

In this chapter, Todd Butler and Ashley Boyd give new reasons for attending to pedagogical training in literary studies classrooms. With so many English majors planning to enter secondary classrooms of their own, Butler and Boyd highlight the potential impact that combining social justice and content knowledge pedagogies can have on generations of classroom learners. At the same time, they claim that including teaching methodologies in undergraduate literature courses builds pedagogy as a habit of mind for all undergraduates, encouraging them to consider issues of social justice in their readings, and how those issues might be effectively conveyed to others.
Stanley Cavell: Emersonian Individualist
Authors: Shaw Dan
Published: May 2020

Ralph Waldo Emerson was Cavell’s most significant intellectual mentor. He claimed that Emerson made a singular contribution to the history of American thought with a clarion call to humanity to become who we are. Emerson sought to revolutionize moral thought by making self realization as central to that enterprise as the Kantian concern for duty or the Utilitarian calculus of what will best serve the greatest number. Cavell situates Emerson’s perfectionism at the heart of his genre theories, and of his account of what “The Good of Film” really amounts to. The chapterl illustrates Cavell’s notion of this Emersonian paragon by discussing Steven Spielberg’s recent treatment of the ascendency of Kay Graham (Meryl Streep), as she takes the reins at The Post and decides it should publish the Pentagon papers despite the legal ban on doing so.
Epicurus and Lucretius
Authors: Del Lucchese Filippo
Published: May 2020

This chapter focusses on Epicurus’s and Lucretius’s treatment of the generation of life, its constancy and consistency, but also its mutability which, together, constitutes the major challenge for the atomist response to the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. Only by explaining abnormality and monstrosity atomists can make sense of their immanent ontology that, based on matter in motion and nothing more, rules out every transcendent, divine, and providential principle of organisation. Order exists in the universe, and yet it includes monstrosity. This concept, thus, must be explained within the limits that nature has to produce its diversity, and the foedera naturai that guarantee such stability. My thesis is that the foedera, and the limits that nature has, are neither imposed on nature from above, nor established by nature in its realm. They are rather the result of atomic motion. Within a plane of radical immanency, thus, not only the foedera discriminates between the possible and impossible kind of monstrosities produced on earth. Successful monstrosities also contributes to determine what these foedera are. This chapter argues that the Lucretian expression foedera naturae is less of a natural law, and closer to the idea of a conjuction or concourse of favourable events. The consequence is to think the inclusion of monstrosity in nature in a completely different way from what Aristotle had done. Whereas Aristotle speaks about monsters’ accidental necessity, this chapter’s thesis is that Lucretius views them as necessarily contributing the self-shaping of nature’s regularity.
Crisis on the Left
Authors: Bryant Jan
Published: May 2020

In the latter decades of the 20th century, accompanied by burgeoning social movements and an unprecedented rise in commodity-desire across the global, the logic driving Marx’s revolutionary subject, the proletariat, was widely refuted. It introduced an anti-Marxist period that did not fully end until the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/8. In 2018, Antonio Negri outlined a case for the continuing importance of Marxist analyses in relation to contemporary economic conditions, particularly Marxist materialism (concrete philosophy). The chapter is situated within this timeline. It outlines disputes between Marxist dogmatism (Negri’s term) and those philosophers who were searching for new ways to understand capitalism in hardening economic times, such as Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault and Negri, suggesting that it forced a split in progressive politics that persists today. [125]
Encounter Two: Lefebvre and Blanchot
Authors: Bryant Jan
Published: May 2020

Henri Lefebvre spent many decades developing a theory of the everyday as a locus of revolutionary potential. Maurice Blanchot takes a sideways route from praising to pulling down Lefebvre’s ‘everyday’, arguing that revolutionary desire cannot dwell in this enigmatic sphere. Rather, the everyday is the unthought, private, absorbing, and self-contained. The failure of Lefebvre to move from abstraction to action, from metaphysics to an effective Marxist critical theory is revealed at a crucial moment in history, as the Left is appearing to fracture in response to the disappointments of 1968. The chapter includes a close analysis of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011) in relation to the everyday and tedium. [110]