827 research outputs found
The Greatest Poem of WWI: David Jones’s In Parenthesis
No full textThe poet and author Owen Sheers traces the story of In Parenthesis, from an English parade ground to the carnage of the Somme offensive. Through readings of key passages, insights from poets such as Simon Armitage, and interviews with David Jones experts, he pieces together the similarities between the poem and David Jones's own war.He explores how In Parenthesis came to be written, and just what makes it such a supreme work. His journey culminates, like the poem, at Mametz Wood in northern France, where David Jones went into battle and encountered terrifying violence first hand
Nietzsche’s Genealogy revisited
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article:This essay begins by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of the developmental strategy adopted in my Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morality” in relation to the contrasting approaches of Conway, Hatab, and Janaway in their studies of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. It then turns to take up a topic that, in the light of the readings of Conway, Hatab, Janaway, and myself, I now take to be much more central than any of us has adequately acknowledged, namely, the relationship of GM to the Hellenistic conception of philosophy. I sketch this argument and explore its implications through Janaway’s and Hatab’s different (but not incompatible) reflections on perspectivism, before finally providing an illustration of how Nietzsche’s indebtedness to the themes of freedom and slavery in ancient philosophy illuminates our understanding of the slave revolt in morals, the psychology of the priest, and the interpretation of the sovereign individual.Given the complexity of the rhetorical and argumentative structure of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, any author presumptuousness enough to offer a study of this text needs to have a clear (and defensible) strategy for approaching it.1 Such strategies may be various, and in the cases under consideration, this is the case. Both Larry Hatab and Dan Conway offer textualist interpretations, with Hatab seeking to communicate the intensely radical character of GM by focusing strongly on the agonistic dimensions of its argument and rhetoric, while Conway reads GM as a Bildungsroman and so seeks to track and explicate Nietzsche’s efforts to guide his readers from innocence to experience. (Such readings need not be incompatible since it could be, for example, that it is through his efforts to construct an internal agon within the reader that Nietzsche seeks to overcome their innocence.) By contrast, both Chris Janaway and I offer more contextualist accounts. Janaway’s strategy is to take Nietzsche at his word and to offer a close reading of the argument of GM in relation to the two philosophical figures—Paul Rée and Arthur Schopenhauer—that Nietzsche identifies as his representative opponents. My own strategy is to adopt a developmental approach to considering GM, one that seeks to reconstruct the reasons—internal to his project of reevaluation—that lead Nietzsche to require a genealogical investigation of morality and to use this reconstruction as a way of orienting the analysis of this text. (And obviously there is some overlap here given Nietzsche’s varied relationships to Schopenhauer and Rée in the course of his philosophical development.) Although my own methodological commitments favor a contextualist approach, it is wise to avoid dogmatism on this issue—not least because one might reasonably note that Ridley’s Nietzsche’s Conscience, perhaps the most widely admired recent analysis of GM and one to which all of the authors considered here are indebted, is thoroughly textualist in its strategy of focusing on the central characters of GM.2 In what follows, I will briefly review my reasons for favoring a developmental form of contextualist account and what I take the strength and limitations of this approach (and of my performance of it) to be. I will then turn to consider what I now see as a central issue for understanding GM—namely, Nietzsche’s relationship to ancient philosophy—that has emerged in the light of further reflection on the arguments presented in these four works. I conclude by briefly reconsidering the nature of Nietzsche’s genealogical enterprise
Tully, Foucault and agonistic struggles over recognition
No full textJames Tully's own work from An approach to political philosophy (1993) to Strange multiplicity (1995) to, most recently, the two volumes of Public philosophy in a new key (2008 and 2009) offers us both a reading of Michael Foucault that makes perspicuous his contribution to contemporary debates concerning recognition and an original elaboration and extension of that contribution. The author's concern in this chapter is, consequently, two-fold: to consider Tully's relationship to Foucault and to show how Tully's use of Foucault within his own work provides a distinctive approach to questions of recognition. The author takes up this task attending to two aspects of Tully's use of Foucault, first, as a critical mode of historical philosophy for approaching the topic of recognition and, second, as a basis for an agonistic account of struggles over recognition
Reviews
No full textJuliet McMaster\u27s Jane Austen, Young Author (Ashgate [now marketed by Routledge], 2016), reviewed by Devoney Looser; Ethel Turner\u27s Tales from the Parthenon and That Young Rebel, edited by Pamela Nutt with others (Juvenilia Press, 2014 and 2015), reviewed by Alexandra Prunean; Laurie Langbauer\u27s The Juvenile Tradition: Young Writers and Prolepsis, 1750-1835 (Oxford UP, 2016), reviewed by David Owen
Post-war British working-class fiction with special reference to the novels of John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, David Storey and Barry Hines
No full textThis study is about British working-class fiction in the post-war period.
It covers various authors such as Robert Tressell, George Orwell, Walter Greenwood, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and DH Lawrence from the early twentieth century; writers traditionally classified as 'Angry Young Men' like John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Shelagh Delaney, John Wain and
Kingsley Amis; and working-class novelists like John Braine, Stan Barstow, David Storey, Alan Sillitoe and Barry Hines from the 1950s and 1960s.
Some of the main issues dealt with in the course of this study are language, form, community, self/identity/autobiography, sexuality and relationship with bourgeois art. The major argument centres on two questions: representation of working-class life, and the
relationship between working-class literary tradition and dominant ideologies.
We will be arguing that while working-class fiction succeeded in challenging and rupturing bourgeois literary tradition, on the level of language and linguistic medium of expression for example, it utterly failed to break away from dominant, bourgeois modes of literary production in relation to form, for instance.
Our argument is situated within Marxist approaches to literature, a political and aesthetic position from which we attempt an analysis and an evaluation of this working-class literary tradition. These critical approaches provide us also with the theoretical tool to define the political perspective of this tradition, and to judge whether it was confined to a descriptive mode of representation or
located in a radical, political outlook
Book Review of Bruce M. Owen et al., The Economics of a Disaster - The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
No full textReview of Bruce M. Owen, David A. Argue, Harold W. Furchtgott-Roth, Gloria J. Hurdle & Gale Mosteller, The Economics of a Disaster - The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (Quorum Books 1995). Acknowledgments, appendices, author index, figures, selected bibliography, subject index, tables. LC 95- 3782; ISBN 0-89930-987-9. [200 pp. Cloth $55.00. 88 Post Road West, Westport CT 06881.
Medicine, Morality, and the Market
No full textIn extracts from a lecture given at McGill University, the author
describes the rise of a marketing or corporate ethos in medicine, stemming
from economic constraints and the demographic pressures of aging populations
in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. To counter the trend to
corporate rather than public policy making in medicine, he advocates a
holistic approach to health care, a revival of interest in preventive health,
and encouragement of the self-help movement. Owen calls for a reorientation
of medical attitudes so that traditional moral values of medicine present a
"counterweight to the mechanistic, technological, cost-effectiveness of the
market place." (KIE abstract
Filosofia y sociedad
No full textLa expresión "Filosofía y Sociedad" no despierta sospechas en los fiió>-sofos conocedores de la Historia de la Filosofía familiarizados hace muchos siglos con el pensamiento Platónico, Agustíano, Hegeliano o con las reflexiones de Tomás Moro, CapaneHa, David Ricardo, Owen, Marx, Prou-dhon, Lasalle y hasta las ideas primigenias de Mo-Tzu en la China, la razón es sencMla, la Filosofía tiene como ambición el forjarse un discurso radical y autofundante sobre la totalidad de lo real
The wrong of involuntary displacement
No full textWhen people are forced to move away from their places of residence, either individually or collectively, we think that they have been seriously wronged. But the exact nature of this wrong is not so clear. After all, those who condemn involuntary displacement are often the same people who celebrate freedom of movement, including movement across national borders. After examining the different forms that involuntary displacement can take, this chapter identifies six distinct types of loss that may be suffered by the displaced. The author suggests that we can best understand the overall loss caused by displacement as loss of homeland. He claims that there is a human need to belong to a homeland, and defends this against the objection that this is a need experienced only by certain groups and individuals, while others favour mobility. He next examines the nature of the wrong that occurs when people are displaced against their will. Using Goodin’s distinction between means-replacing and ends-displacing compensation, the author shows that the displaced cannot be fully compensated for their loss. Finally he asks whether the right way to respond to this loss is to offer the displaced a choice between return, local integration, and resettlement as durable solutions to their predicament
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