Charles Algernon Swinburne's literary reputation rests almost exclusively upon his poetry, and though his critical writings were voluminous, they are usually slighted by literary historians. Examinations of Swinburne's aesthetic principles, too, are generally based upon interpretations of his poetry, though these may be as misleading as the discrepancies between other artists' principles and practices. Believing that a solid and consistent core of poetic theory underlay all of Swinburne's critical essays, casual pieces, and letters, Professor Connolly has attempted to reconstruct the theory from a careful analysis of this body of writing. In this book he sets forth his findings as general principles and as they apply to lyric and dramatic poetry. "Swinburne was a far sounder and more consistent critic than he is usually given credit for being," Professor Connolly concludes, "and the various critical principles that can be discovered in his essays hang together in a more integrated theory of poetry than is usually imagined. He had, as other critics had, a number of basic principles and themes that he used with astonishing versatility in his criticism. The successful poet who is also a critic usually has a valuable contribution to make to the general understanding and appreciation of poetry. Swinburne, in this respect, was not an exception.
Charles Algernon Swinburne's literary reputation rests almost exclusively upon his poetry, and though his critical writings were voluminous, they are usually slighted by literary historians. Examinations of Swinburne's aesthetic principles, too, are generally based upon interpretations of his poetry, though these may be as misleading as the discrepancies between other artists' principles and practices. Believing that a solid and consistent core of poetic theory underlay all of Swinburne's critical essays, casual pieces, and letters, Professor Connolly has attempted to reconstruct the theory from a careful analysis of this body of writing. In this book he sets forth his findings as general principles and as they apply to lyric and dramatic poetry. "Swinburne was a far sounder and more consistent critic than he is usually given credit for being," Professor Connolly concludes, "and the various critical principles that can be discovered in his essays hang together in a more integrated theory of poetry than is usually imagined. He had, as other critics had, a number of basic principles and themes that he used with astonishing versatility in his criticism. The successful poet who is also a critic usually has a valuable contribution to make to the general understanding and appreciation of poetry. Swinburne, in this respect, was not an exception.
This edition of a 1995 book (Sage Publications) contains a new introduction by the series editor and a new preface. Readers familiar with Foucault's work will appreciate the difficulty in critically studying its arresting paradoxical nature. Dumm (political science, Amherst College) negotiates the problem by creating a thematic framework--the idea of being "free" in a modern Western capitalist democracy--and examining it through a Foucaultian lens. He focuses on the politics of freedom, negative freedom, the disciplinary society, ethics, seduction, governments, and provides an enlightening companion to Foucault's postmodern philosophy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In A Politics of the Ordinary, Thomas Dumm dramatizes how everyday life in the United States intersects with and is influenced by the power of events, on the one hand, and forces of conformity and normalcy on the other. Combining poststructuralist analysis with a sympathetic reading of a strain of American thought that begins with Emerson and culminates in the work of Stanley Cavell, A Politics of the Ordinary investigates incidents from everyday life, political spectacles, and popular culture. Whether juxtaposing reflections about boredom in rural New Mexico with Emerson's theory of constitutional amendment, Richard Nixon's letter of resignation with Thoreau's writings to overcome quiet desperation, or demonstrating how Disney's Toy Story allegorizes the downsizing of the American white-collar work force, Dumm's constant concern is to show how the ordinary is the primary source of the democratic political imagination.
Thomas Gustafson examines how and why Americans renewed and developed the tradition of writing connecting political disorders and the corruption of language between the ages of the Revolutionary and the Civil Wars.
Tracking the development of Foucault's key concepts Lemke offers the most comprehensive and systematic account of Michel Foucault's work on power and government from 1970 until his death in 1984. He convincingly argues, using material that has only partly been translated into English, that Foucault's concern with ethics and forms of subjectivation is always already integrated into his political concerns and his analytics of power. The book also shows how the concept of government was taken up in different lines of research in France before it gave rise to "governmentality studies" in the Anglophone world. Foucault's Analysis of Modern Governmentality provides a clear and well-structured exposition that is theoretically challenging but also accessible for a wider audience. Thus, the book can be read both as an original examination of Foucault's concept of government and as a general introduction to his "genealogy of power.
Establishes Shakespeares plays as some of the periods most speculative political literature Shakespeares Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeares plays reveal there is always something more terrifying to the king than rebellion. The book seeks to move beyond the presumption that political evolution leads ineluctably away from autocracy and aristocracy toward republicanism and popular sovereignty. Instead, it argues for affirmative politics in Shakespeare the process of transforming scenes of negative affect into political resistance. Shakespeares Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeares affirmative politics appears not in his dialectical opposition to sovereignty, absolutism, or tyranny; nor is his affirmative politics an inchoate form of republicanism on its way to becoming politically viable. Instead, this study claims that it is in the place of dissensus that the expression of the eventful condition of affirmative politics takes place a fugitive expression that the sovereign order always wishes to shut down. Key FeaturesPromotes a new understanding of 'fugitive democracy'Establishes the presence of a form of alternative politics in early modern drama, articulated through the contours of theories of sovereigntyExplores how the parameters of contemporary radical politics take shape in major Shakespeare plays, including Coriolanus, King John, Henry V, Titus Andronicus, The Winters Tale and Julius Caesar
James Joyce: A Guide to Research, first published in 1982, is a selective annotated bibliography of works by and about James Joyce. It consists of three parts: the primary bibliography – which includes separate bibliographies of Joyce’s major works, of scholarly editions or collections of his works of his letters, and of concordances to his works; the secondary bibliography – which includes bibliographies of bibliographical, biographical, and critical works concerning Joyce generally or his individual works; and major foreign-language studies. This title will be of interest to students of literature.
The Political Economy is ideally suited as a supplementary text for courses in American government and politics, policy studies, business-government relations, and economic issues and policy making. It integrates selections from the very finest new and classical works of political and economic analysis, by distinguished scholars, into a comprehensive overview of the American political system.
In this volume, Tierney identifies convenience as the value of central importance to the development of modern technical culture. While revealing modern attitudes toward technology, the human body, mortality, and necessity, Tierney focuses on the cultural value of convenience and on modern attitudes which emphasize consumption rather than production of technology.
In Ethnic Identity and Minority Protection: Designation, Discrimination, and Brutalization, Thomas W. Simon examines a new framework for considering ethnic conflicts. In contrast to the more traditional theories of justice, Simon’s theory of injustice shifts focus away from group identity toward group harms, effectively making many problems, such as how to define minorities in international law, dramatically more manageable. Simon argues that instead of promoting legislative devices like proportional representation for minorities, it is more fruitful to seek adjudicative solutions to racial and ethnic-related conflicts. For example, resources could be shifted to quasi-judicial human-rights treaty bodies that have adopted an injustice approach. This injustice approach provides the foundation for Kosovo’s case for remedial secession, and helps to sort out the competing entitlement claims of Malays in different countries. Indeed, the priority of Thomas W. Simon’s Ethnic Identity and Minority Protection is to ensure the tales of designation and discrimination told at the beginning of the work do not become the stories of brutalization told at the end. In short, the challenge tackled in this text is to assure that reason reigns over hate.
When your friends call on you to take to the streets and demand the fall of the regime, this presses a practical predicament that we all address, often implicitly, in our everyday lives: is this regime legitimate? Facing Authority investigates the ways in which this question of legitimacy can be addressed in theory and practice, in the face of disagreement and uncertainty. Instead of asking "what makes authorities legitimate?" in the abstract, it examines how the question of legitimacy manifests itself in practice. How can we distinguish whether a regime is legitimate, or merely purports to be so? And what does it mean to do this well? Facing Authority proposes that judging legitimacy is not a matter of applying moral knowledge, provided by political philosophy, but of engaging in various forms of political contestation-contestation over the representation of power (what is the nature of the regime?), collective selfhood (who am I, and who are we?), and the meaning of events (what happened here-a coup, or a revolution?). These questions constitute the heart of the question of legitimacy, but thus far they have been neglected by theorists of legitimacy. This book offers a new way of thinking about political legitimacy and practical judgment, interweaving philosophical analyses of key concepts (including representation, identity, and temporality) with concrete examples of struggles for legitimacy, from the German Autumn to the Arab Spring. The result is a pragmatist alternative to predominant moralist and realist approaches to legitimacy in political philosophy"--
Despite perennial interest in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the world’s first encyclopedia, as a record of the prodigious, the quotidian, and the useful in Rome in the first century AD, for centuries Pliny has been derided as little more than an inept compiler of facts and marvels intellectually incapable of formulating a cogent argument supported through the selective marshaling of his materials. In Pliny’s Defense of Empire, Laehn offers a radical reinterpretation of the architecture of Pliny’s encyclopedia, exposing fundamental errors in the inherited understanding of the text traceable to its initial reception in ancient Rome. Recognition of the text’s true structure reveals that Pliny’s encyclopedia is in fact a first-rate work of political philosophy constituting an apology for Roman imperial expansionism grounded in a sophisticated account of human nature. Correcting the accreted errors and prejudices of nearly 2,000 years of faulty Plinian scholarship, Laehn critically examines one of the most persuasive apologies for the Roman Empire ever written and succeeds in rehabilitating the Elder Pliny as one of the world’s greatest political thinkers. An excellent resource and a must read for scholars in political theory, philosophy, and classical studies.
Traces the history of bribery from ancient Egypt to ABSCAM, examines changing perceptions of bribery, and discusses the legal, ethical and religious injunctions against bribes
Rhetoric is widely regarded as a kind of antithesis to reason. Here, Farrell restores rhetoric as an art of practical reason and enlightened civic participation, grounding it in its classical tradition - particularly in the rhetoric of Aristotle.
An extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of home, through explorations literary and political, philosophical and deeply personal, by the acclaimed author of Loneliness as a Way of Life. Home as an imagined refuge. Home as a place of mastery and domination. Home as a destination and the place we try to escape from. Thomas Dumm explores these distinctively American understandings of home. He takes us from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s little house on the prairie and Emily Dickinson’s homestead, and finally to the house Herman Wallace imagined and that sustained him during his forty-one years of solitary confinement at Angola State Penitentiary. Dumm argues that it is impossible to separate the comforting and haunting aspects of home. Each chapter reveals a different dimension of the American experience of home: slavery at Monticello, radical individuality at Walden, Indian-hating in the pioneer experience, and the power of remembering and imagining home in extreme confinement as a means of escape. Hidden in these homes are ghosts—enslaved and imprisoned African Americans, displaced and massacred Native Americans, subordinated homemakers, all struggling to compose their lives in a place called home. Framed by a prologue on Dad and an epilogue on Mom, in which the author reflects on his own experiences growing up in western Pennsylvania with young parents in a family of nine children, Home in America is a masterful meditation on the richness and poverty of an idea that endures in the world we have made.
“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.
Alien Politics retrieves from the writings of Marx an original theory of the state which remains viable and relevant today. Paul Thomas traces the process by which Marx's theory of the state as the instrument of the capitalist ruling class became transformed into communist dogma under the auspices of Lenin and other "official" Marxist stalwarts. He argues that Marx's writings still have something to teach us and should not be pulled down with the monoliths and mausoleums of communism.
Hegel's philosophy of religion contains an implicit political theology. When viewed in connection with his wider work on subjectivity, history and politics, this political theology is a resource for apocalyptic thinking. In a world of climate change, inequality, oppressive gender roles and racism, Hegel can be used to theorise the hope found in the end of that world. Histories of apocalyptic thinking draw a line connecting the medieval prophet Joachim of Fiore and Marx. This line passes through Hegel, who transforms the relationship between philosophy and theology by philosophically employing theological concepts to critique the world. Jacob Taubes provides an example of this Hegelian political theology, weaving Christianity, Judaism and philosophy to develop an apocalypticism that is not invested in the world. Taubes awaits the end of the world knowing that apocalyptic destruction is also a form of creation. Catherine Malabou discusses this relationship between destruction and creation in terms of plasticity. Using plasticity to reformulate apocalypticism allows for a form of apocalyptic thinking that is immanent and materialist. Together Hegel, Taubes and Malabou provide the resources for thinking about why the world should end. The resulting apocalyptic pessimism is not passive, but requires an active refusal of the world.
This book is about the global resurgence of culture and religion in international relations, and how these social changes are transforming our understanding of International Relation theory, and the key policy-related issue areas in world politics. It is evident in the on-going debates over the 'root causes' of 9/11 that there are many scholars, journalists and members of the public who still believe culture and religion can be explained away by appeals to more 'basic' economic, social or political forces in society. Therefore The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations presents an argument for taking culture - and particularly religion - as social forces that are important for understanding world politics in the post-Westphalian era.
Examines the theoretical achievements and the political impact of the new materialisms Materialism, a rich philosophical tradition that goes back to antiquity, is currently undergoing a renaissance. In The Government of Things, Thomas Lemke provides a comprehensive overview and critical assessment of this “new materialism”. In analyzing the work of Graham Harman, Jane Bennett, and Karen Barad, Lemke articulates what, exactly, new materialism is and how it has evolved. These insights open up new spaces for critical thought and political experimentation, overcoming the limits of anthropocentrism. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of a “government of things”, the book also goes beyond new materialist scholarship which tends to displace political questions by ethical and aesthetic concerns. It puts forward a relational and performative account of materialities that more closely attends to the interplay of epistemological, ontological, and political issues. Lemke provides definitive and much-needed clarity about the fascinating potential—and limitations—of new materialism as a whole. The Government of Things revisits Foucault’s more-than-human understanding of government to capture a new constellation of power: “environmentality”. As the book demonstrates, contemporary modes of government seek to control the social, ecological, and technological conditions of life rather than directly targeting individuals and populations. The book offers an essential and much needed tool to critically examine this political shift.
In this truly interdisciplinary study that reflects the author's work in philosophy, political science, law, and policy studies, Thomas W. Simon argues that democratic theory must address the social injustices inflicted upon disadvantaged groups. By shifting theoretical sights from justice to injustice, Simon recasts the nature of democracy and provides a new perspective on social problems. He examines the causes and effects of injustice, victims' responses to injustice, and historical theories of disadvantage, revealing that those theories have important repercussions for contemporary policy debates. Finally, Simon considers which institutions and practices come within the grasp of democracy and discusses the concept of a 'Negative Utopia, ' or a future without injustice.
Humans rank with the powerful forces of nature transforming Earth. Since the mid-20th century, population growth, industrialization, and globalization have had such deep and wide-ranging impacts that our planet no longer functions as it did during the previous eleven millennia. So distinctive is this collective human intervention that a new geological interval has been proposed; it is called the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is intriguing scientifically, fascinating intellectually, and deeply disturbing politically, socially, economically, and ethically. We must learn how to co-exist sustainably with the rest of nature in what is emerging as a new planetary state. To do so, we must first understand what "Anthropocene" means in all its dimensions. This book adopts a multidisciplinary approach, starting with an exploration of the Anthropocene as a geological concept: ranging across the physical changes to the landscape, to the rapidly heating climate, to a biosphere undergoing transformation. And what of the "anthropos" in the Anthropocene? While geoscience does not normally address political and ethical issues of justice and equity, or economics and culture, Anthropocene studies in the humanities and social sciences investigate the complexities of the human activity driving global change. Here the book looks at human history, both in the deep past and more recently, the politics and economics of growth spurring the Anthropocene, and potential ways of mitigating its cruel effects. Our fragile, still beautiful, planet is finite. The new realities of the Anthropocene will need our best efforts, across disciplinary divides, at effective hope and action.
The whole problem of our time is the problem of love. How are we going to recover the ability to love ourselves and to love one another? We cannot be at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we cannot be at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God. There is a distinction between a contrite sense of sin and a feeling of guilt. The former is a true and healthy thing, the latter tends to be false and pathological. The man who suffers from a sense of guilt does not want to feel guilty, but at the same time he does not want to be innocent. He wants to do what he thinks he must not do, without the pain of worrying about the consequences. The history of our time has been made by dictators whose characters, often transparently easy to read, have been full of repressed guilt. They have managed to enlist the support of masses of men moved by the same repressed drives as themselves. Modern dictatorships display everywhere a deliberate and calculated hatred for human nature as such. The technique of degradation used in concentration camps and in staged trials are all too familiar in our time. They have one purpose: to defile the human person.
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