bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Renewing Britain's New Labour Project
Authors: Taylor Robert
Published: February 2012

The New Labour "project" is often regarded outside of Britain as a successful example of how social democracy can be modernized. "The progressive consensus" is what the country's new prime minister, Gordon Brown, calls it. Tony Blair, his predecessor, often spoke of New Labour as representing "the third way" in democratic politics. The joint creators of the project that started thirteen years ago sought a grand narrative for their party that would reconcile constitutional government with the dynamic challenges posed by globalization and rapid technological change. In their contrasting personal styles, they claimed that they wanted to make Labour's century-old ethical values of liberty, equality, and fraternity relevant to the modern world—and not only in Britain. Brown and Blair believed that their project held important significance for the progressive left everywhere.
The Bleeding Wound: Zimbabwe's Slow Suicide
Authors: Linfield Susie
Published: February 2012

Zimbabwe was known as the "jewel of Africa," as Samora Machel, the Marxist president of Mozambique, told Robert Mugabe when the new nation won its independence in 1980. As the second-most-industrialized country on the continent, the former Southern Rhodesia already had a decent infrastructure, including roads and railways ("You were lucky to have had the British," another Mozambican leader told Mugabe, no doubt wistfully); an energetic, talented, book-hungry populace; and democratic institutions such as a relatively free press and a functioning judiciary. The problems, of course, were immense: there was the need to recover—economically, psychically, spiritually—from over a decade of brutal civil war; and there were vast disparities between whites and blacks in wealth, education, skills, and land ownership. But in addition to having had some historic, manmade luck, Zimbabwe was naturally lucky, too: beautiful, mineral-rich, and astoundingly fertile. Zimbabwe's vast, sophisticated commercial farms were ingeniously irrigated and passionately tended; they produced, and often exported, fruits, flowers, peanuts, grains, tobacco, cotton, coffee, poultry, pigs, and some of the best beef in the world. Doris Lessing, who was raised in Southern Rhodesia, called the country "paradise," and she is among the least sentimental of writers.
Reading the Candidates
Authors: Greenberg David
Published: February 2012

George W. Bush became president in part because people thought he was his father. This isn't to say that people voted for the younger Bush because they expected he would continue the "kinder, gentler" conservatism the elder Bush had once endorsed. Rather, it's to recall that some people literally thought the man seeking the White House in 2000 was the ex-president. Three days before the South Carolina primary, one Republican voter, speaking to a New York Times reporter, declared himself a "Bush supporter," yet showed puzzlement at references to an unnamed father. "Oh!" the twenty-three-year-old William Lee finally said. "You mean it's George Bush's son who is running this time? It's not President Bush again? Is that right?"
Sand Castles and Snake Pits: Homelessness, Public Policy, and the Law of Unintended Consequences
Authors: Rubin Lillian B.
Published: February 2012

The walk from my home on top of San Francisco's Nob Hill down to my studio at its bottom is a lesson in class and status in America. As each few blocks take me down another rung on the socioeconomic ladder, I move from the clean, well-tended streets at the summit through increasingly littered, ill-kept neighborhoods where property values decrease as the numbers of potholes and homeless people increase. At the bottom of the hill sits the notorious "Tenderloin," a district that houses what the Victorians called "the lower orders," where the desperate and the dangerous hang on every street corner waiting for the local food kitchen to open its doors.
Johann Hari Replies
Authors: Hari Johann
Published: February 2012

Nick Cohen's response is perplexing, characterized as it is by daft hyperbole (I'm Maoist now?), denial of his own statements, and arguments that he knows I agree with and have done more to advance than he. It's disappointing he doesn't try to defend his positions or engage with any of my arguments, despite the fact I tried hard to fairly summarize his case. For example, he simply repeats his claim that the Iraq War marked a radical break with Henry Kissinger's influence on U.S. foreign policy—and, to sustain this, he ignores the lengthy part of my review pointing out that Kissinger is now, according to Bob Woodward, "the most senior foreign policy adviser to [Bush] outside the administration." This information doesn't fit into his Manichean polemics so, rather than defend his case, he simply pretends it isn't so.
French Unions: Myths & Realities
Authors: Schain Martin A.
Published: February 2012

This past spring, French president Nicolas Sarkozy published a "point of view" article in the French newspaper Le Monde entitled "For Strong Unions." After writing of his desire to enhance the "social dialogue," he expressed his support for measures that would promote the organizational strength and legitimacy of the trade union movement. Indeed, just a week before, on April 11, five union confederations, together with the three most important employer groups in the country, announced a "common position on representivity, social dialogue and the financing of the trade union movement." The agreement, by requiring a minimum threshold of electoral support in certain "social elections" (for shop stewards and plant committees, for example), would give legal standing to only the largest confederations; it would also require that collective agreements on wages and working conditions be signed by these same unions in order to be valid.
Race & Gender in Politics
Authors: Rubin Lillian B.
Published: February 2012

In the spring of 1995, when Lane Kirkland’s old order was toppling and John Sweeney's young(er) Turks were poised to revitalize the American labor movement, one of the movement's leading operatives gave me his take on what was behind the revolt. "We didn't join the labor movement when it represented 20 percent of the work force," he said—and by "we," he meant a generation of more militant organizers, children of the sixties, who were then in their forties—"only to see it drift down to 5 percent on our watch."
The "Duke" and Democracy
Authors: Taylor Charles
Published: February 2012

One of the great joys of the movies is their ability to convince us that we know the people on screen. Even the varied performances of the most versatile stars are often not strong enough to prevail against the overarching image we've formed of them. When Joan Didion met John Wayne on the set of the 1965 The Sons of Katie Elder, she wrote of having the sense that his face was more familiar to her than her husband's.
Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn't Learn
Authors: Cohen Mitchell
Published: February 2012

A determined offensive is underway. Its target is in the Middle East, and it is an old target: the legitimacy of Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas are not the protagonists, the contested terrains are not the Galilee and southern Lebanon or southern Israel and Gaza. The means are not military.
All Fired Up: Women, Feminism, and Misogyny in the Democratic Primaries
Authors: Stansell Christine
Published: February 2012

Think back to a year and a half ago, to spring 2007, when this all began. Despite Hillary Clinton's advantages in connections and money going into the primaries, those in the know cited a multitude of reasons she would fall flat on her face. Women were one. "Women don't like her," the pundits declared with relish. They didn't like her even more than men didn't like her. She was too ambitious, a flip-flopper, a trimmer, an opportunist. She didn't deserve to be where she was. She should have left Bill years ago.
Does European Social Democracy Have a Future?
Authors: Taylor Robert
Published: February 2012

A luxurious hotel in rural Hertfordshire on the outskirts of London might seem a surprising venue for a conference of the world's self-declared progressives. But members of the democratic center-left power elites, mainly from Europe, but with a sprinkling from Latin America and elsewhere, were in residence this spring to discuss the theme of "An Inclusive Globalisation; Promoting Prosperity for All." The mood of the well-heeled participants was surprisingly upbeat and complacent. The social democrats of the world seem still to believe they remain a political force to be reckoned with.
Traveling Light
Authors: Tuhus-Dubrow Rebecca
Published: February 2012

To the extent that the two are separable, Ryszard Kapuscinski is revered as much for his legendary persona as for his work. Until his death last January at seventy-four, the Polish journalist and badass embodied the glamour of the uncompromising foreign correspondent. For decades he rushed toward the places everyone else wanted to flee, to be there for the war, the coup, even the humdrum poverty. Rather than interviewing officials, his preferred research method was idling in bars with locals. And he recorded his impressions with acuity and lyricism, in books that are often said to transcend the limits of journalism.
The Writer in Russia: Individualism and the "New Emotionalism"
Authors: Medvedev Kirill
Published: February 2012

In this essay, Medvedev attempts to connect some tendencies he sees in current Russian art, poetry, and politics. What he finds there is "the new emotionalism," an appeal on the part of poets and politicians alike to personal experience and authenticity. In part this apparently inward turn is a natural reaction to a situation in which all public debate (about capitalism, about Putin) has been eliminated; but it is also a necessary condition for the current regime to remain in power. Followers of the American literary scene—with its rash of memoirs (including fake ones), continued but debased identity politics, and frequent appeals by even the least memoiristic writers to their "sincerity"—as well as followers of the American blogosphere, with its shrill self-assertions and self-promotion, will find much that is familiar in the world Medvedev describes.
The Last Page
Authors: Mort Jo-Ann
Published: February 2012

Israeli politics is an excellent example of why term limits can be a good thing. In a country where losing consecutive elections for decades doesn't cost politicians their party leadership, let alone their ability to serve as government ministers or members of Knesset, the political class has grown incredibly stale. Party labels mean little, with the socialism of the Labor Party long gone and some leaders of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party aiming to sustain a permanent welfare state, at least for their own constituents. There's nearly no difference among the big parties on economics; in the end, they all support some form of a liberalized free market.
Waiting to Serve
Authors: Walzer Michael
Published: February 2012

I have never served on a jury, but I have been a potential juror, waiting in the basement of the Trenton courthouse with many others. Four or five times I was called to sit there, for a couple of days or for a week, but never called to serve. Tocqueville claims that it's the actual service, the experience of sitting in judgment, rather than just sitting, which has educational value. I am sure that's true, but my hours of sitting ended in one remarkable educational moment.
Revisiting a Vast Majority: A Journal from India
Authors: Epstein Cynthia Fuchs , Epstein Howard
Published: February 2012

In The Vast Majority, a book published thirty-one years ago, Michael Harrington wrote of a trip to India during the reign of Indira Gandhi. He mused on the chutzpah of reporting his impressions after only a few weeks in this enormous country. But, he noted, "To know a country from the inside, one must live there for years; to know it infinitely better than someone who has never been there, weeks will suffice." With Harrington's words in mind, we offer some perspectives gathered during a trip to India by Western sociologists that we co-led under the sponsorship of the People to People Foundation—a nongovernmental organization formed with the support of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to bring American professionals face-to-face with counterparts in other regions of the world.
Fire and Flood: What a Difference Class and Race Make, or Did Brian Williams See the News?
Authors: Rubin Lillian B.
Published: February 2012

Fire and Flood. We call them natural disasters, but a closer look suggests a human hand at work as well. Three years before Katrina hit the gulf coast, Mike Parker, the former head of the Army Corps of Engineers, warned that the levees, which crumbled under the impact of the hurricane, were bound to give way one day. To support his plea for funds to repair them, he brought samples of the corroded steel supports to his White House superiors. "It doesn't matter if a terrorist blows the lock up or if it falls down because it disintegrates," Parker told the director of the Office of Management and Budget. "Either way it's the same effect, and if we let it fall down, we have only ourselves to blame." The response from an indifferent and irresponsible administration was to force Parker's resignation.
History, Amnesia, and the N Word
Authors: Wellington Darryl Lorenzo
Published: February 2012

The subject is small—a word. Yet the subject contained within the subject is immeasurable: racism American-style. It isn't always a good idea to reduce vast social dimensions to a pithy cognomen—all the great "isms" are finally irreducible—but there are special cases, and when Jabari Asim asks us to examine American racism (particularly racism against black Americans) through the lens of a single word, it's remarkable how much history he squeezes into the text.
Daily Life and the Jury System
Authors: Sleeper Jim
Published: February 2012

When I worked as a regular newspaper columnist, I absorbed two informal, folkloric strictures on subject matter: No columns based on conversations with cab drivers and none touting jury service as a magisterium of democracy, where one's faith in the people is refreshed. The fear, I think, was that a columnist who dotes on the wisdom of cabbies or fellow jurors is confessing that he becomes one of "the people" only from the back of a cab or when he has been summoned legally to meet with "the people" face-to-face.
Culture Workers of Cold War Hollywood
Authors: Wiener Jon
Published: February 2012

From High Noon to The Ten Commandments, from low-budget horror films like Them! to noir melodramas like Panic in the Streets, Hollywood was a key arena for the giant U-turn in American politics that took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Long-time Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman offers his new book as a "chronicle of American politics" from 1946 to 1956, "filtered through the prism of Hollywood movies—their scenarios, backstories, and reception." Hoberman's focus is not on the biggest movies, or the best, but rather on the "movies that best crystallize, address, symptomize, or exploit their historical moment." With a nod to Horkheimer and Adorno, he considers the people who made movies to have been "politically aware culture workers." During the Second World War, Hollywood had joined the Left's fight against fascism, the fight for democracy and equality. Then, with the coming of the Cold War, "Hollywood accepted a new mission and assigned itself a role. . . in the new war—both in terms of movies made and careers unmade."
American Exodus
Authors: Arnesen Eric
Published: February 2012

In the year or so before Woodrow Wilson's administration took the United States into the Great War raging in Europe, Americans recognized that something unusual was taking place in communities across the South: African Americans were departing in unprecedented numbers for the North. While black and white contemporaries might have differed on the particulars, the outline they saw was clear. With the European war dramatically reducing the number of immigrants, laborstarved industrialists were tapping a labor force they had previously ignored or rejected. And since the vast number of blacks lived in the South, labor recruiters logically turned their attention toward that region. Advertising good jobs, high wages, and a level of personal freedom unknown in the land of Jim Crow, recruiters, black newspapers, and earlier migrants spread the word that exclusionary employment barriers were falling and that a land of hope now beckoned. In the first wave of what was called the "Negro Exodus," a half million southern blacks headed North; in the decade after the war, another 700,000 followed. The Great Migration was on.
The Boldness of Hedgehogs
Authors: Ryan Alan
Published: February 2012

Reviewers ought not to begin apologetically. It undermines their credibility. Nonetheless, I feel diffidence in the face of Justice for Hedgehogs. It is an astonishing book in ways both expected and unexpected. Moreover, it covers so many topics that the response of many of its readers will be to assign it to a graduate class in moral philosophy, political theory, and jurisprudence and work through it page by page and insight by insight. Indeed, Ronald Dworkin's Preface tells us that this has already happened to it in draft, and that there is a website— www.justiceforhedgehogs.net —where readers can post their doubts and questions, and where he will as far as possible respond to them.
Tragedy in the Fields: The Self-destruction of the United Farm Workers
Authors: Lichtenstein Nelson
Published: February 2012

Frank Barcdacke’s history of the United Farm Workers therefore shifts much of our attention from the fasts, marches, and boycotts that made Cesar Chavez and the farm workers so iconic in the late 1960s. Instead, he refocuses the narrative onto the next decade, when Chavez became an increasingly self-destructive leader even as an enormously hopeful wave of farm worker militancy exploded across the state, not in the Delano-area vineyards, where the UFW never actually won the allegiance of most farm workers, but among the vastly larger work-force that labored in the Oxnard lemon orchards; the Salinas lettuce fields; and in the garlic-, tomato-, and melon-producing areas of the state.Chavez embodied the pitfalls of charismatic leadership, but the entire UFW experience also demonstrates that social movement unionism, even when most triumphant and inspiring, requires participatory mechanisms that can give effective voice to all those who join such a sprawling and multifaceted insurgency. Victory cannot be truly consolidated unless it is rooted in a set of democratic institutions.
Dancing Over Catastrophes: The Far Right and Roma in Hungary
Authors: Ahmari Sohrab
Published: February 2012

Ágnes Daróczi—today Hungary’s most prominent Roma rights activist—cut her political teeth in Miskolc. Yet she finds little inspiration in her memories of those heady days. “I’m afraid if we built this sort of solidarity action now,” she told me in a resigned voice, “we would not overcome.” Daróczi’s sentiments represent more than a veteran activist’s nostalgia for the heyday of Hungarian liberalism. Tensions between the country’s Magyar majority and Roma minority are at an all-time high. In the provinces, real and imagined cigánybnözés (“Gypsy-crime”) has galvanized neofascistic militias that terrorize Roma communities. At the national level, 17 percent of Hungarians have now embraced the explicitly anti-Roma platform put forth by Jobbik, arguably Europe’s most dangerous far-right party. Widespread dissatisfaction with the economic outcomes of transition and Western integration have relit the smoldering embers of Hungarian nationalism—undermining democratic values and institutions that had only begun to take root.
All for the Union...and Emancipation, too: What the Civil War Was About
Authors: Manning Chandra
Published: February 2012

As we enter the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, we are seeing reiterations of a tradition that separates the cause of Union from the issue of slavery and insists that the Civil War changed little and achieved less. Only rarely do we see acknowledgment of the hundreds of thousands of casualties, so many that we would need a loss of life equal to that sustained on September 11, 2011, every single day for four years to recreate the scale today. If in fact the war meant so little, then there would have been no good reason for those loyal to the Union to resist secession in 1861, no purpose to all those deaths, and therefore there would be good reason for indifference to the Union cause today.

But the men who fought in blue would not recognize their war in that interpretation. To them, the president’s exhortation to remember the “unity and liberty” achieved by the war would mean something, because to them, Union victory was necessary for the survival of representative government based on ideals such as liberty and equality, was inextricably bound up with emancipation, and marked the redemption and transformation, not simply conservation, of the United States.
Tomasz Różycki and the Long Life of the Past
Authors: Gross Irena Grudzinska
Published: February 2012

Poetry has a very economical way of using language, good for nations that do not have a lot of peace and quiet. This may help explain the excellence of the poetic tradition in a country like Poland. The best known Polish poets—Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Tadeusz Rózewicz, Zbigniew Herbert—lived through the devastations of the Second World War and the travails of the cold war that followed. They mastered a way of transmitting their experience of history in a personal and very condensed way. That tradition continues beyond the generations that had a direct collision with war and violence. The consequences of the Second World War are still with us. Tomasz Rózycki is one such witness to the continuity of the past.
“Those Sounds That Had Obtained a Command”: Voice, Power, and Submission in Cooper’s Sea Fiction
Authors: Sinche Bryan
Published: February 2012

This essay evaluates the significance of voice and “natural language” in James Fenimore Cooper’s first three maritime novels, The Pilot (1824), The Red Rover (1827), and The Water-Witch (1830). In each of those works Cooper imagines ships with absolute command hierarchies structured according to vocal power, a trait that provides evidence of a “natural aristocracy” and proves to be the sine qua non of maritime authority. Drawing on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century theories of voice and elocution, I show how Cooper used the ideals of “natural language” to structure the command hierarchies on board his fictional ships. I argue that his use of such hierarchies allowed Cooper to unite two competing elements of his political imagination: on the one hand, his patriotism and reverence for the common citizenry and, on the other hand, his appreciation for a strong, legally constituted authority that would guide that citizenry. Sailors and junior officers on board Cooper’s fictional ships understand and accept that vocal ability precedes and confirms a commander’s authority, and their mute obedience to strong-voiced leaders re-flects the existence of a dictatorial shipboard government that is anything but tyrannical. By positioning voice as the foundation of power on board ship, Cooper transforms, as if by magic, nondemocratic shipboard command into an authoritarian liberalism that might also obtain on land.
Bulilima's "Look-South" Policy: Gender and Socio-Economic Implications
Authors: Matsa Mark , Matsa Winniefridah
Published: February 2012

People in the southern and western border districts of Zimbabwe have always looked South (Botswana and South Africa) for economic prosperity. Reasons for this include proximity, common languages, as well as historical and cultural ties with ethnic groups in the two neighbouring countries. This trend, herein referred to as 'Bulilima's look-south policy' continues to flourish despite the recently declared official national 'Look-east policy' by government in response to Western-imposed 'targeted' economic sanctions over the land seizures from former white commercial farmers in 2000. Although the country has experienced significant increase in cross-border trade as well as brain and brawn (muscle) drain, significant in Bulilima District is brawn drain. In fact, it would appear a man in Bulilima is not yet a man unless and until he has gone to settle and work either in South Africa or Botswana. This southward drift has actually become an initiation ceremony for the district's youth and has reduced it into a district of children, women and the elderly. This study sought to assess the nature, socio-economic and gender implications of this southward flow for the south-western district of Bulilima near the border town of Plumtree. It also sought to identify the most mobile groups as well as specific reasons for migrating down south. The research applies a case study approach. Questionnaires, in-depth interviews, informal discussions as well as observations were used to solicit information from respondents. Systematic sampling was used to select questionnaire respondents while chiefs, school heads and nursing sisters at clinics /hospitals were subjects for interviews. Results show that males migrate more than women and that there was even a marked increase in the number of emigrants in the first decade of 2000 because of the dire socio-economic conditions prevalent in the country then. This southward migration has resulted in both negative and positive socioeconomic implications in the district. It has also seen a shift in gender roles whereby some roles, traditionally identified with a specific sex, are now done by both sexes. The study recommends that the export processing zone status of Plumtree town as well as the dollarization of the economy be used to harness this labour flight. It also recommends that a Bulilima District Association be formed by the emigrants (njivas) to help develop their district, and sensitization programmes on issues of health, children and women's rights be initiated.
The Dynamics of Land Transaction Practices among the Karrayu Pastoralists in the Upper Awash Valley of Ethiopia: The Cases of Abadir and Merti Communities
Authors: Gebre Ayalew
Published: February 2012

The pastoral mode of adaptation in the Awash Valley region of Ethiopia has long been under increasing pressure and stress as a result of manmade and ecological factors. The expansion of large-scale irrigation agriculture and conservation schemes has over the years led to the expropriation of vast portions of prime grazing land. Like other neighbouring pastoral groups in the area, pastoral Karrayu have borne the brunt of the resulting consequences. Unable to a large extent to practice their transhumant pastoral way of life in the customary way, the Karrayu have become compelled to resort to alternative livelihood strategies. Irrigated farming in the well-watered neighbourhoods is a major activity that they have embarked upon. In the wake of this shift have come about transformations in the patterns of settlement and land use and tenure arrangements. Concomitantly, horticultural communities have evolved, accompanied by different land access institutions and emerging land transaction practices. This study was conducted with a view to examining the dynamics of the evolving land use and access strategies, and generating fresh evidence in the context of a community under transformation from pastoral to agro-pastoral form of livelihood. The study was undertaken in an agro-pastoral setting, unlike most others that were conducted predominantly in smallholder agricultural communities of the highlands. Therefore, it is expected that the study will impart fresh insights of academic relevance as well as policy implications, thereby helping to fill the existing gap in knowledge on the subject of land use and tenural research.
The Culture of War and Civil Society in the Reigns of William III and Anne
Authors: Lincoln Andrew
Published: February 2012

The essay examines the representation of war in poems and church services during the reigns of William III and Queen Anne. It identifies relations between social discipline and the imaginative participation in violence, and considers how war—described by poets as a test of heroism, and represented by the church as the occasion for spiritual purgation—served the interests of those who wanted to regulate and refine the manners of civil society. It argues that the promotion of gentler manners did not undermine the commitment to military aggression, but worked in the service of it.
Imagination, Conjecture, and Disorder
Authors: Lamb Jonathan
Published: February 2012

Imagination can put the world together or tear it apart, depending on how it works. Comparing the Cartesians and the empiricists of the eighteenth century, it is evident that the latter are more seriously invested in imagination than the former, partly because they rely on conjecture for the discovery of facts while the Cartesians use imagination to dispel the authority of sense impressions. Is it possible to suppose that when imagination becomes disordered, conjecture and factuality begin to be at odds? By using Northanger Abbey as a test case, the essay finds that there is a kind of fact-based empiricism (represented by Catherine Morland) that is hostile to conjecture but at the same time hospitable to romance. What are the implications of such a state of affairs for empirical truth and the probability of the novel?
Popular Culture and Sporting Life in the Rural Margins of Late Eighteenth-Century England: The World of Robert Anderson, ''The Cumberland Bard''
Authors: Huggins Mike
Published: February 2012

This study sets out to extend and challenge existing historiography on late eighteenth century British popular culture, customary sports, class and cultural identity, focusing upon the rural geo-political borderland of England. It suggests that prevailing class-based and more London-biased studies need to be balanced with more regionalist-based work, and shows the importance of northern regional leisure variants. The textual and historical analysis draws largely on the published works of a neglected working-class dialect poet, Robert Anderson, living and working in Cumberland, arguing that he represented a strain of ''bardic regionalism,'' a variant of Katie Trumpener’s ''bardic nationalism.''
A ''Don Juanized'' Macbeth on Austria's Enlightened Stage: Its Genesis, Its Critical Fortunes
Authors: Goehring Edmund J.
Published: February 2012

In 1772, a leading Viennese playright wrote an adaptation of Macbeth to replace a banned Don Juan scenario that had run for decades during the Octave of All Souls. If Macbeth and Don Juan strike the modern mind as an odd pairing, such was also the case in Enlightened Vienna: the playwright himself wrote a lengthly apologia , invoking the authority of Aristotle, Marmontel, and Moses Mendelssohn, to rationalize the moral monstrosity of his tragic protagonist. The Viennese Macbeth and its commentary generated considerable controversy, and from this conflict arise the first sustained attempts to articulate a poetics of Don Juan theater, a repertory that the critical community had hitherto largely passed over in silence.
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: Spectation and the Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere
Authors: Powell Manushag N.
Published: February 2012

This essay examines the observational and didactic behavior of the eidolons of The Spectator , The Auditor , and The Prater , concluding that such periodicals understand spectation as a practice that is far more than merely visual. Their means of acknowledging the full-bodied complexity of the art of the gaze in turn points to their vulnerability as disembodied voices of authority, and opens the possibility that subjects, particularly women, can always reject the authority of social and textual scrutiny.
The ''Reluctant'' Politician: Thomas Jefferson's Debt to Epicurus
Authors: Holowchak M. Andrew
Published: February 2012

Jefferson's philosophical and political thinking owes a great debt—one which he often acknowledged—to ancient Greek and Roman thinking. Foremost among ancient thinkers was Epicurus, the Greek whose philosophy Jefferson called “the most rational system remaining of the philosophy of the ancients, as frugal of vicious indulgence, and fruitful of virtue as the hyperbolical extravagances of his rival sects.” He refers to Epicurus in a letter to Short as “our master,” elaborates on a physics and cosmology in that is Epicurean, and states that Epicurus’ ethics contains “everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.” Moreover, though he committed himself to decades of public service, he always talked about the need to retire to attend to his own affairs and assume a life of tranquil study—the Epicurean good life. Was Jefferson an Epicurean? The aim of this paper is to show in what areas of philosophical thought Jefferson owes Epicurus an especial debt.
Introduction: The Drift of Fiction
Authors: Park Julie
Published: February 2012

Drawing the trajectory from Ian Watt to critics like Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, Catherine Gallagher, Deidre Lynch, and Franco Moretti, the Introduction to this special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation engages the ongoing conversation about the novel -- an entity that remains provisional, open-ended, and far from monolithic. This special issue gives us a new picture of the eighteenth-century novel not so much as a unified body, but as self-conscious permutations of fiction that drift rather than march into mixed forms of realism. For this reason, fiction—with its meaning rooted in fashioning, framing, and inventing—is a more apt term for the elastic imaginative prose narratives of eighteenth-century England than novel.
Disjecta Membra: Smollett and the Novel in Pieces
Authors: Blackwell Mark
Published: February 2012

Many seminal accounts of the novel as a genre have disregarded Smollett or viewed him as an oddity. However, the works of Smollett and his neglected mid-century contemporaries should be construed not as deviations from the main tradition of literary fiction, but as exemplary of the state of the novel in the period. Various aspects of Smollett's achievement as a fiction writer—characters that shiver into collections of quirky attributes, a thematic emphasis on fragmented bodies and fungible identities, paratactic plots that fracture into episodic patchworks, the juxtaposition of usually discrete styles and conventions, and diverse experiments with point of view—demand that we reconsider stock assumptions about the novel's organic unity and concede that the early history of prose fiction lies in pieces.
The Property of God: Luther, Calvin, and Herbert's Sacrifice Sequence
Authors: Richey Esther Gilman
Published: February 2012

I argue here that William Empson's interpretation of George Herbert's "The Sacrifice" as well as Debora Shuger and Michael Schoenfeldt's Calvinist readings must be called into question in the light of a Christology that is distinctively Lutheran, not Calvinist. In fact, Herbert's The Temple makes central to its poetics an erotic and sacrificial exchange, evident in Martin Luther's Christology as the act of a dying God, which is subsequently developed and given form in Herbert's "The Sacrifice." This exchange transforms identity and agency by placing divine property in human hands and by making poetry an ongoing, erotic celebration of this communion. To close on a property that transforms politics, economics, and spirituality, I argue that Herbert's "Redemption" makes Luther's "communion of properties" the ultimate exchange.
Swinburne Contra Whitman: From Cosmopolitan Republican to Parochial English Jingo?
Authors: Saville Julia F.
Published: February 2012

Marking the centenary year of Algernon Charles Swinburne's death, this essay revisits the politics of his poetry--his "cosmopolitan republican" poetics--in the light of recent critical theories of "rooted cosmopolitanism." Taking as illustration Swinburne's ongoing transatlantic engagement with Walt Whitman's poetics, now regrettably exemplified for many readers by his pointedly mean-spirited critique, "Whitmania" (1887), the essay argues that the contraction of Swinburne's later republicanism is less evidence of his increasing jingoism, as Cecil Y. Lang sees it, than of the difficulties he encountered negotiating the continuing demands of being both inclusively cosmopolitan and an English-identified republican.
Shadow Economies: The Distribution of Wealth in and Around Pudd'nhead Wilson
Authors: Esteve Mary
Published: February 2012

This essay situates Pudd'nhead Wilson within the context of nineteenth-century political-economic theory and neo-Kantian ethical idealism. It argues that Mark Twain stages, primarily through the figure of Roxy, the crisis of the pensionless, which resonates with neo-Kantian political-economists' call for a more equitable distribution of wealth. The essay argues that the novel's economic plot—the loss and restoration of Roxy's financial security—gets routed through the novel's race plot, with the trope of slavery enabling material conditions of economy to be redescribed as ethical conditions of political economy.
Common Life, Animal Life, Equality: The Last Man
Authors: Strang Hilary
Published: February 2012

This essay argues that Mary Shelley's novel reveals an overlooked concern about the form of democracy emergent in the early nineteenth century: the anxiety that the equality required for a truly democratic political order is inevitably indistinguishable from a dehumanizing logic of populationist equivalence. Such a logic, the novel suggests, risks making human life and animal life indistinguishable. I argue that the novel mobilizes a rigorous political pessimism to reject both Thomas Paine's claim that life alone is enough for politics and William Godwin's claim that culture can step in to ensure that human life can still be distinguished from animal life, even under conditions of radical equality.
The Tragedy of Good Friday: Sacrificial Violence in King Lear
Authors: Anderson David K.
Published: February 2012

In this article I claim that the presentation of sacrificial or persecutory violence in William Shakespeare's King Lear is heavily influenced by ambivalence in Reformation England towards acts of religious violence. I begin by arguing that the crowds attending the execution of martyrs manifested what can be understood as a Girardian sacrificial crisis, where the unifying force of the deaths was undercut by an ethical dilemma over the justice of physical coercion, and contend that the Acts and Monuments of John Foxe exemplified this dilemma and contributed to it. I then examine passages from the Acts and Monuments alongside the blinding of Gloucester and the death of Cordelia arguing that, like Foxe, Shakespeare demystifies sacrificial violence, exposing it as something ugly, unjust, and alienating.
The Winter's Tale and the Oracle of the Law
Authors: Strain Virginia Lee
Published: February 2012

This article examines The Winter's Tale in the legal-political context of the first decade of the seventeenth century. legal writings and in charactery, the epithet "oracle" was used to distinguish a legal-political type, the legal expert and wise counselor whose authority was established through specific deliberative and self-fashioning practices. In The Winter's Tale , I argue, Apollo's supernatural oracle evokes these same human judicial figures, or oracles of the law, and the trial scene thereby refracts early seventeenth-century tensions between the judiciary and the sovereign. While Apollo's oracle makes a minor appearance in the form of its pronouncement, nevertheless its judicial presence is extended throughout the play via the characters who act as its proxies, Paulina and Camillo.
Wallace Stevens, Analogy, and Tautology: The Problem of a Secular Poetics
Authors: Mutter Matthew
Published: February 2012

This essay argues that the work of Wallace Stevens provides the most complex modernist account of the difficulties inherent in trying to write poetry within a secular imaginary. I argue that his poetry dramatizes three strategies of transition from a religious to a secular imaginary—the adaptation of, substitution for, and elimination of religious concepts—and the problems these strategies encounter. The essay focuses on Stevens's concern that poetry's characteristic manipulations of language—analogy, metaphor and symbol—continue to, through their intrinsic logic, generate religious experience, and in doing so thwart the poet's desired secularism. It examines his attempt to forge a secular poetic of tautology and his recognition of the impossibility of sustaining such a poetics.
Research, Collaboration, and Intelligence: When Governments Take an Interest in Feminist Ethnography
Authors: Ghodsee Kristen
Published: February 2012

The discipline of anthropology has been wracked with controversy since the 2007 establishment of a new program within the United States military, which officially employs anthropologists and other social scientists to collect "ethnographic intelligence" on local populations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program, the Human Terrain System (HTS), was created to help U.S. military personnel better understand local cultural contexts. As part of this program, experts throughout the academy are being contacted by State Department officials to provide information on topics of interest to those in the Pentagon. The politicization of ethnographic fieldwork has posed a series of moral dilemmas for anthropologists, particularly feminist anthropologists who work with already vulnerable populations. This article proposes to examine the question of collaboration with reference to the HTS and recent debates raging among anthropologists about whether or not to cooperate with the U.S. government or any foreign government. Drawing on the author's own experiences conducting fieldwork among Slavic Muslims in Bulgaria, during which she was "invited" to share her findings with both the Bulgarian and American governments, the goal of the article is to openly discuss these dilemmas and offer some brief suggestions about how to navigate the murky waters of doing research in an increasingly fraught global context.
Canaries and Coalmines: Toxic Discourse in The Incredible Shrinking Woman and Safe
Authors: Hosey Sara
Published: February 2012

The article examines cinematic representations of the chemical contamination of the female homemaker's body. Engaging the discourse of illnesses caused by the by-products of technology and industry, these films reveal a profound anxiety regarding the integrity of our homes and bodies, as well as a skepticism of the solutions offered by scientific and technological advances, while foregrounding the obstacles confronting women who attempt to challenge the social and scientific status quo. I argue that the protagonists of the Lily Tomlin vehicle The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981) and Todd Haynes's film Safe (1995) are postmodern Cassandras: Women in possession of knowledge that their communities aggressively deny. In order to contextualize these narratives of women who testify to environmental degradation's potentially disastrous impact on human health and well being, I situate these films within a tradition proceeding from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and continued in Lois Gibbs's Love Canal: My Story (1982). In suggesting that the environment is disabling and that attitudes can be disabling, these films invite consideration of the interrelatedness of the weight of scientific authority, the persistent deployment of the charge of "hysteria" when a woman articulates an unpopular notion, and the use of metaphor as an instrument of silencing.
History Transformed?: Gender in World War II Narratives in U.S. History Textbooks, 1956–2007
Authors: Schrader Corbin Elizabeth , Wotipka Christine Min
Published: February 2012

This article utilizes qualitative methods to explore changes in women’s representation in a specific historical topic: World War II narratives. On one hand, war discourse is fundamental to the historical understanding of politics in many parts of the world. Furthermore, since the time World War II narratives first appeared in school textbooks, women’s status has significantly increased around the world and in the United States. As a result, these narratives provide an interesting case to examine historical and enduring gender roles and power structures. Using a collection of twelve U.S. history secondary school textbooks published between the years 1956 and 2007 and used in California’s public schools, we employ a modified version of Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault’s (1986) five stages of thinking about women’s history as our coding scheme. Our findings reveal not only greater mentions of women in newer textbooks, but also a greater use of compensatory and “bi-focal” narratives. However, we argue that these more recent texts still fall far short of adopting multifocal, relational narratives that challenge hegemonic gender relations.
Girls’ Schooling, Gender Equity, and the Global Education and Development Agenda: Conceptual Disconnections, Political Struggles, and the Difficulties of Practice
Authors: Unterhalter Elaine , North Amy
Published: February 2012

This article reviews ten years of political and analytical discussions regarding the global development agenda on girls’ schooling and gender equity. It considers struggles over the purpose and realizability of the global agenda, and attempts to widen frameworks to go beyond gender parity in access and enrollment. Drawing on a case study of one global NGO that took a women’s rights approach, it shows how difficult it has been, even in the best kind of organizational environment, to realize a women’s rights agenda that linked education to other forms of empowerment. These difficulties are confirmed by critical reflections on participation in the conference convened to review ten years of the work of the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI). However, the conclusions, while acknowledging problems of multiple sites of action, silences, and the attenuation of transformatory agendas, nonetheless point to a richer conceptual vocabulary, a wider range of actors, and clearer strategic orientation than a decade ago.
Chomsky's Separation of Syntax and Semantics
Authors: Washburn David L.
Published: February 2012

By maintaining a separation between syntax and semantics, the author argues that the waw followed by doubling element, as found in the waw -consecutive, should be understood as an inflectional morpheme, signaling a separate thought not syntactically connected with what precedes it.
Intertextual Relations and Their Rhetorical Significance in Abba Kovner's Daf Kravi
Authors: Shoham Reuven
Published: February 2012

The paper deals with Abba Kovner's Daf Kravi [Combat Page], which he wrote during the War of Independence while he was acting as a Politruk (an Education and Information Officer) of the Giva'ti brigade. The function of the Daf (page) was to invigorate and inspire the exhausted fighters of the brigade, facing the Egyptian army 60 km from Tel Aviv. In order to succeed in his mission, Kovner made an exhaustive use of intertextuality with very well-known texts from Russian war prose of World War II as well as Hebrew texts, beginning from the Bible and ending in his own days. He uses the biblical text as a means to inspire every soldier to be a biblical hero, like Samson and the People of Israel in the days of Moses and Joshua. As for modern Hebrew poetry, he attached his Dappim to the vengeance poetry, especially to Bialik and Alterman. This kind of intertextuality places Kovner as a prophetic hero to the Giva'ti fighters; and according to the partial evidence we have, this kind of rhetorical image found its way to the hearts of his addressee and accomplished his mission.