Essay Argues (essay + argue)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences


Selected Abstracts


Response to Sayler Liturgical Texts, Ritual Power, and God's Glory: The Deconstruction of a Homosexual Identity through the Lens of a Doxological Anthropology

DIALOG, Issue 1 2005
Amy C. Schifrin
Abstract:, Looking at the scriptures as that which bear witness to a doxological anthropology, this essay responds to Gwen Sayler's article, "Beyond the Biblical Impasse: Homosexuality through the Lens of Theological Anthropology." This essay argues that the approach to the church's decision concerning the ordination of open and active self-identified homosexuals and the blessing of same-sex homoerotic relationships needs to be based on the sacramentality of the Creator's design of male and female and the doxological anthropology present in the apostolic witness. It examines the meaning of ritualizing the complementarity of male and female as the patterning by which humanity understands its source and its destiny. [source]


Elusive '68: The Challenge to Pedagogy

DIE UNTERRICHTSPRAXIS/TEACHING GERMAN, Issue 2 2008
William Collins Donahue
Teaching ,68 presents pedagogical challenges far greater than assembling a set of workable classroom materials. Divisive controversies that were the hallmark of the time,e.g., the debate over the nature and appropriate use of violence,are with us still, though in a somewhat different form. Further, the instructor,s own politics and positionality can hardly be ignored,as they will certainly not be overlooked by our students. Additionally, this essay argues that fundamental terms (such as who qualifies as a ,68er) remain problematic; that the instrumentalization of the Holocaust by the German New Left continues to affect political decisions down to the present; that our investment as teachers in poststructuralist literary theory may,perhaps inadvertently,affect the way we view and therefore teach ,68; and, finally, that there is a pressing need, despite a recent explosion in Germany of publications celebrating the fortieth anniversary of ,68, for a didacticized reader designed for the North American German Studies classroom. [source]


Badiou, Pedagogy and the Arts

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2010
Thomas E. Peterson
Abstract The essay distils from Badiou's writing a pedagogy based on his theories of knowledge and truth, as brought to bear on poetry and the arts. By following Badiou's implicit ontology of learning, which presupposes a dynamic and passionate engagement with a concrete situation, the essay argues that Badiou's view of modernity, in particular, contributes greatly to the educational topic, and offers an alternative teaching paradigm to the outmoded schools of criticism of the 20th century. It also argues that the concept of universalism in education, as against identitarian particularism, is further evinced from a discussion of Badiou's study of St. Paul. [source]


Going Dutch in London City Comedy: Economies of Sexual and Sacred Exchange in John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan (1605)

ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 1 2010
Marjorie Rubright
Conventional approaches to London city comedy have explored the genre's dependence upon character types. Through a consideration of the ways in which English and Dutch ethnicity is represented in city comedy, this essay reveals that a critical and methodological revision is necessary. In John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan and Thomas Middleton's The Family of Love, puns and double entendres vivify characterizations of Dutchness and Englishness as unstable and problematically proximate. What emerges is a study of the chiastic interplay of differences and similarities that constitute Englishness and Dutchness in London city comedy. I argue that across the Anglo-Dutch relation identity was more of an analogous phenomenon than a digital one. In tracing how English-identified characters "go Dutch," this essay argues that city comedy was actively exploring and keeping in play the fluidity of signifiers of ethnic difference, especially language, diet, and religious belief. (M.R.) [source]


"All Hayle to Hatfeild": A New Series of Country House Poems from Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 44 [with text]

ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2008
Tom Lockwood
Presented here in semi-diplomatic transcription of a newly discovered poem from Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection MS Lt q 44, "All Hayle to Hatfield" is composed of a sequence of eight unattributed poems (one in two parts), addresses the family of William Cecil, 2nd Earl of Salisbury (1591,1668), and describes in detail one of their residences, Hatfield House. Probably composed between July 1625 and April 1627, the sequence of poems appears never to have been printed and may, since it is not listed in the first-line indexes of the Beinecke, Bodleian, Folger and Huntington libraries, be unique to this manuscript. This essay briefly introduces the sequence of poems in relation to their local, political, and literary contexts. Chief among such contexts are Hatfield House, its gardens and its chapel; the essay argues that the relationship of the poems to questions of religion, ceremony, and the Duke of Buckingham allows them to be read in the context of mid-1620s political debate. Consolidating this reading, it is argued that the sequence's frequent allusions to Ben Jonson's poem "To Penshurst" and his masque, The Gypsies Metamorphosed, potentially align its literary sources with its political contexts. [source]


Gendering the History of Women's Healthcare

GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2008
Monica H. Green
This essay examines the genesis and continuing influence of certain core narratives in the history of western women's healthcare. Some derive from first-wave feminism's search for models of female medical practice, an agenda that paid little attention to historical context. Second-wave feminism, identifying a rift between pre-modern and modern times in terms of women's medical practices, saw the pre-modern European female healer as an exceptionally knowledgeable empiricist, uniquely responsible for women's healthcare and (particularly because of her knowledge of mechanisms to limit fertility) a victim of male persecution. Aspects of this second narrative continue subtly to effect scholarly discourse and research agendas on the history of healthcare both by and for women. This essay argues that, by seeing medical knowledge as a cultural product , something that is not static but continually re-created and sometimes contested , we can create an epistemology of how such knowledge is gendered in its genesis, dissemination and implementation. Non-western narratives drawn from history and medical anthropology are employed to show both the larger impact of the western feminist narratives and ways to reframe them. [source]


August 1961: Christa Wolf and the Politics of Disavowal

GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 1 2002
Charity Scribner
Throughout her career Christa Wolf has circumvented any explicit reference to the Berlin Wall. Although Der geteilte Himmel reaches its climax in the summer of 1961, the Wall does not figure in this novel. None the less it provides a framework for the narrative through its absence. Wolf's latest novel, Medea, also organises itself around the tropes of walls and borders. Today, forty years after Berlin's division, one could easily dismiss Wolf's writing because of her ,blind spot'vis-á-vis the Wall. But to do so would forfeit Wolf's subtle handling of literary representation, prohibition, and disavowal. This essay argues that Wolf's elaborations of disavowal play a critical (but as yet unexamined) role in the continuing debate over the politics of memory that has come to define German studies. Freudian theories of repression and fetishism are engaged to discern the structures of disavowal that give form not only to Der geteilte Himmel and Medea, but also to Wolf's most important writings on ethics, ,Selbstanzeige' and ,Nagelprobe'. The essay concludes that authentic memory does not reconstitute a homogeneous image of the past. Rather, as Wolf demonstrates, it reawakens the antagonisms that forever thwart the resolution of and in any narrative. [source]


Valuing health: a new proposal

HEALTH ECONOMICS, Issue 3 2010
Daniel M. Hausman
Abstract After criticizing existing systems of health measurement for their unargued commitment to evaluating health states in terms of preferences or well-being, this essay argues that public rather than private values of health states should help guide the allocation of health-related resources. Private evaluation of health states is relative to a prior individual choice of specific activities and goals, while public evaluation is relative to the whole range of important activities and goals. Public evaluation is concerned with securing a wide range of choices as well as with success given one's choice. A reasonable simplification from the public perspective is to focus on just two features of health states: the subjective feelings attached to health states and the limitations that health states imply on the range of important activities that individuals can pursue. Focusing on just these two dimensions permits the construction of a parsimonious classification of health states with regard to what matters most from the public perspective. This classification, which resembles those in the HALex and the Rosser and Kind Disability and Distress Index, might best be built on top of existing health-state classifications, by mapping the health states they define to activity-limitation/feeling pairs. To assign values to these pairs, I propose relying on deliberative groups to make comparisons among the pairs with respect to the relation ,is a more serious limitation on the range of objectives and good lives available to members of the population'. A ranking according to this property, is not a preference ranking, because it is not a ranking in terms of everything that matters to individuals. Working back from the weights attached to the activity-limitation/feeling pairs, one can impute weights for the health states in other classification systems that were mapped to those pairs. If those weights coincide roughly with current weights, then one legitimizes current weights and provides a vehicle for their public discussion and possible revision. If those weights do not coincide, then one has both an argument for revising current views of the cost effectiveness of treatments and policies and a method to carry out such a revision. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


PHOTOGRAPHS, SYMBOLIC IMAGES, AND THE HOLOCAUST: ON THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF DEPICTING HISTORICAL TRUTH

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2009
JUDITH KEILBACH
ABSTRACT Photography has often been scrutinized regarding its relationship to reality or historical truth. This includes not only the indexicality of photography, but also the question of how structures and processes that comprise history and historical events can be depicted. In this context, the Holocaust provides a particular challenge to photography. As has been discussed in numerous publications, this historic event marks the "limits of representation." Nevertheless there are many photographs "showing" the Holocaust that have been produced in different contexts that bespeak the photographers' gaze and the circumstances of the photographs' production. Some of the pictures have become very well known due to their frequent reproduction, even though they often do not show the annihilation itself, but situations different from that; their interpretation as Holocaust pictures results rather from a metonymic deferral. When these pictures are frequently reproduced they are transformed into symbolic images, that is, images that can be removed from their specific context, and in this way they come to signify abstract concepts such as "evil." Despite being removed from their specific context these images can, as this essay argues, refer to historical truth. First, I explore the arguments of some key theorists of photography (Benjamin, Kracauer, Sontag, Barthes) to investigate the relationship between photography and reality in general, looking at their different concepts of reality, history, and historical truth, as well as the question of the meaning of images. Second, I describe the individual circumstances in which some famous Holocaust pictures were taken in order to analyze, by means of three examples, the question what makes these specific pictures so particularly suitable to becoming symbolic images and why they may,despite their abstract meaning,be able to depict historical truth. [source]


THE "INS" AND "OUTS" OF HISTORY: REVISION AS NON-PLACE

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 4 2007
MARNIE HUGHES-WARRINGTON
ABSTRACT Revision in history is conventionally characterized as a linear sequence of changes over time. Drawing together the contributions of those engaged in historiographical debates that are often associated with the term "revision," however, we find our attention directed to the spaces rather than the sequences of history. Contributions to historical debates are characterized by the marked use of spatial imagery and spatialized language. These used to suggest both the demarcation of the "space of history" and the erasure of existing historiographies from that space. Bearing these features in mind, the essay argues that traditional, temporally oriented explanations for revision in history, such as Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, miss the mark, and that a more promising line of explanation arises from the combined use of Michel Foucault's idea of "heterotopias" and Marc Augé's idea of "non-places." Revision in history is to be found where writers use imagery to move readers away from rival historiographies and to control their movement in the space of history toward their desired vision. Revision is thus associated more with control than with liberation. [source]


Actualism and the Fascist Historic Imaginary

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2003
Claudio Fogu
This essay argues that, just like liberalism and communism, fascist ideology was based on a specific philosophy of history articulated by Giovanni Gentile in the aftermath of World War I. Gentile's actualist notion that history "belongs to the present" articulated an immanent vision of the relationship between historical agency, representation, and consciousness against all transcendental conceptions of history. I define this vision as historic (as opposed to "historical") because it translated the popular notion of historic eventfulness into the idea of the reciprocal immanence of the historical and the historiographical act. I further show that the actualist philosophy of history was historically resonant with the Italian experience of the Great War and was culturally modernist. I insist, however, that the actualist catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal act was also genealogically connected to the Latin-Catholic rhetorical signification of "presence" that had sustained the development of Italian visual culture for centuries. Accordingly, I argue that the fascist translation of actualism into a historic imaginary was at the root of Italian fascism's appeal to both masses and intellectuals. Fascism presented itself as a historic agent that not only "made history," but also made it present to mass consciousness. In fact, I conclude by suggesting that the fascist success in institutionalizing a proper mode of historic representation in the 1920s, and a full-blown historic culture in the 1930s, may have also constituted a fundamental laboratory for the formation of posthistoric(al) imaginaries. [source]


Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting, or Why Are These Pictures So Terrible?

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 4 2002
Steven Conn
The Civil War generated hundreds of history paintings. Yet, as this essay argues, painters failed to create any iconic, lasting images of the Civil War using the conventions of grand manner history painting, despite the expectations of many that they would and should. This essay first examines the terms by which I am evaluating this failure, then moves on to a consideration of the American history painting tradition. I next examine several history paintings of Civil War scenes in light of this tradition and argue that their "failure" to capture the meaning and essence of the war resulted from a breakdown of the narrative conventions of history painting. Finally, I glance briefly at Winslow Homer's Civil War scenes, arguably the only ones which have become canonical, and suggest that the success of these images comes from their abandonment of old conventions and the invention of new ones. [source]


Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 4 2000
Luise White
This essay argues that secrets and lies are not forms of withholding information but forms by which information is valorized. Lies are constructed: what is to be lied about, what a lie is to consist of, how it is to be told, and whom it is to be told to, all reveal a social imaginary about who thinks what and what constitutes credibility. Secrets are negotiated: continual decisions about whom to tell, how much to tell, and whom not to tell describe social worlds, and the shape and weight of interactions therein. All of this makes lies and secrets extraordinarily rich historical sources. We might not see the truth distorted by a lie or the truth hidden by a secret, but we see the ideas andimaginings by which people disclose what should not be made public, and how they should carry out concealing one narrative with another. Such insights involve a step back from the project of social history, in which an inclusive social narrative is based on experience and individuals' ability to report it with some reliability, and suggests that historians need to look at social imaginings as ways to understand the ideas and concerns about which people lie and with which people construct new narratives that are not true. The study of secrets, however, links the study of social imaginings with the project of social history, as the valorization of information that results in the continual negotiation and renegotiation of secrets shows individuals and publics imagining the experiences labeled as secret because of the imagined power of a specific version of events. [source]


Calvinist Internationalism and the English Officer Corps, 1562,1642

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2006
David Trim
This article uses a crucial but little-known text to examine two problematic issues in early-modern history: whether there was, in any meaningful sense, a ,Calvinist international'; and the extent to which religious commitment influenced career soldiers. The Defence of Militarie Profession (1579), by a Calvinist soldier, Geoffrey Gates, is rich on both issues and an excellent potential source for students. This article outlines how close reading reveals a transnational concept of the Reformed Churches as Israel, derived from a distinctive understanding and application of the Bible. Then, analysis of English military officers indicates that many were Calvinist and shared this internationalist concept of their confession. Thus, this essay argues that a ,Calvinist international' did exist as a conscious transnational movement and that its ideology was an important factor in the mental world of English career soldiers; and it introduces a text that students can use to explore these large issues. [source]


A Socially Relevant Philosophy of Science?

HYPATIA, Issue 1 2004
Resources from Standpoint Theory's Controversiality
Feminist standpoint theory remains highly controversial: it is widely advocated, used to guide research and justify its results, and yet is also vigorously denounced. This essay argues that three such sites of controversy reveal the value of engaging with standpoint theory as a way of reflecting on and debating some of the most anxiety-producing issues in contemporary Western intellectual and political life. Engaging with standpoint theory enables a socially relevant philosophy of science. [source]


Global Religious Transformations, Political Vision and Christian Witness,

INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MISSION, Issue 375 2005
Vinoth Ramachandra
From the nineteenth-century onwards religion has been, and continues to be, an important resource for nationalist, modernizing movements. What was true of Protestant Christianity in the world of Victorian Britain also holds for the nationalist transformations of Hindu Neo-Vedanta, Theravada Buddhism, Shintoism and Shi'ite Islam in the non-Western world. Globalizing practises both corrode inherited cultural and personal identities and, at the same time, stimulate the revitalisation of particular identities as a way of gaining more influence in the new global order. However, it would be a gross distortion to identify the global transformations of Islam, and indeed of other world religions, with their more violent and fanatical forms. The globalization of local conflicts serves powerful propaganda purposes on all sides. If global Christian witness in the political arena is to carry integrity, this essay argues for the following responses, wherever we may happen to live: (a) Learning the history behind the stories of ,religious violence' reported in the secular media; (b) Identifying and building relationships with the more self-critical voices within the other religious traditions and communities, so avoiding simplistic generalizations and stereotyping of others; (c) Actively engaging in the political quest for truly participatory democracies that honour cultural and religious differences. In a hegemonic secular culture, as in the liberal democracies of the West, authentic cross-cultural engagement is circumvented. There is a militant secularist ,orthodoxy' that is as destructive of authentic pluralism as its fundamentalist religious counterpart. The credibility of the global Church will depend on whether Christians can resist the totalising identities imposed on them by their nation-states and/or their ethnic communities, and grasp that their primary allegiance is to Jesus Christ and his universal reign. [source]


Imposing International Norms: Great Powers and Norm Enforcement1

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2007
RENEE DE NEVERS
What role does force play in changing international norms and who is it used against? This essay argues that when great powers seek to promote new norms, they will coerce the weak; persuasion is saved for the strong. The interaction of two factors,the standing of the target state in the international society of states and its power relative to the norm-promoting great power,helps explain the use, or nonuse, of force by great powers seeking to promote norms. The cases of the slave trade, piracy, and state sponsorship of terrorism are examined to evaluate how the attributes of norm-violating states affect the likelihood that great powers will intervene to encourage states to adopt new norms. Power appears to be the best defense against being targeted by a great power seeking to promote norm change, but good standing in the international society of states is an important deterrent against intervention. [source]


International Regimes: The Case of Western Corporate Governance

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2006
DAVID A. DETOMASI
Accounting and financial scandals of unprecedented scale have recently occurred in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Much of the cause for these scandals has been attributed to the poor corporate governance standards practiced by the offending companies, leading researchers to re-examine how corporate governance affects economic development. One topic receiving significant research attention has been whether national corporate governance systems are likely to converge, what form that convergence may take, and what barriers currently inhibit convergence. This essay argues that the tools of regime theory hold significant potential for helping to structure empirical inquiry into the process of corporate governance convergence. It then draws upon the recent experience of Western corporate governance systems to illustrate how a consensus on norms, values, and principles in the issue area of corporate governance is emerging. The essay concludes by drawing out the implications of the developing corporate governance regime for emerging market economies and the general topic of global governance. It also poses questions for continued empirical research in the area of corporate governance and international relations. [source]


The Study of Democratic Peace and Progress in International Relations,

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2004
Fred Chernoff
This essay argues that the field of international relations has exhibited "progress" of the sort found in the natural sciences. Several well-known accounts of "science" and "progress" are adumbrated; four offer positive accounts of progress (those of Peirce, Duhem, Popper, and Lakatos) and one evidences a negative assessment (Kuhn). Recent studies of the democratic peace,both supporting and opposing,are analyzed to show that they satisfy the terms of each of the definitions of scientific progress. [source]


Psychodynamic and Neurological Perspectives on ADHD: Exploring Strategies for Defining a Phenomenon

JOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 4 2001
Adam Rafalovich
This article is a discourse analysis of two historical inquiries into what clinici-ans today call attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Of primary con-cern in this regard are psychodynamic perspectives towards ADHD symptoms, championed by psychoanalysts and psychologists, and neurological perspectives towards ADHD, which continue to favor a purely physiological approach to understanding the disorder. Those within the psychodynamic camp are inclined to view ADHD as an interactional difficulty between self and social environment - a condition best remedied by psychotherapy. Those within the neurological camp see ADHD as a specific brain process, whose effective treatment depends upon adequate psychopharmacology. This essay argues that both psychodynamic and neurological perspectives towards ADHD have strategized to legitimate one perspective through the expulsion of the other. Within the current era of ADHD nomenclature and treatment it is clear that neurological perspectives dominate the debate. However, neurological perspectives continue to be haunted by a considerable amount of skepticism, both nationally and internationally. Because of this it would be difficult to assert that neurological perspectives, though winning the "legitimation race" in contemporary understandings of ADHD, are entirely monolithic sources of ADHD knowledge. [source]


Framing the Carolingian Economy

JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 1 2009
MATTHEW INNES
This essay argues that the degree of commercialization on Carolingian great estates should not be overstated. Rather, the strategies and ambitions of Carolingian estate managers were primarily determined by a ,domainal' ideology and concerns for good stewardship. Moreover, the structural demands of the Carolingian state may have played a rather more important role in framing economic conditions than is commonly supposed. Here Carolingianists need to learn some of the lessons that have helped to transform the writing of ancient economic history in recent decades. [source]


Crisis and Organisational Paralysis: The Lingering Problem of Korean Public Administration

JOURNAL OF CONTINGENCIES AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2001
Jong S. Jun
This essay argues that the Korean crisis is caused by the enduring problems of administrative culture, such as central control of decision-making, corruption, passive learning, moral decay, and a lack of self-governance and autonomy of administrators. The crisis has brought organisational paralysis because public administrators are not capable of responding to and coping with the crisis situation. The authors state that solutions to these problems are difficult and require strategies beyond short-term, instrumental solutions because change involves education and raising consciousness of public servants at all levels. [source]


THE UNIVERSALITY OF JEWISH ETHICS: A Rejoinder to Secularist Critics

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 2 2008
David Novak
ABSTRACT Jewish ethics like Judaism itself has often been charged with being "particularistic," and in modernity it has been unfavorably compared with the universality of secular ethics. This charge has become acute philosophically when the comparison is made with the ethics of Kant. However, at this level, much of the ethical rejection of Jewish particularism, especially its being beholden to a God who is above the universe to whom this God prescribes moral norms and judges according to them, is also a rejection of Christian (or any other monotheistic) ethics, no matter how otherwise universal. Yet this essay argues that Jewish ethics that prescribes norms for all humans, and that is knowable by all humans, actually constitutes a wider moral universe than does Kantian ethics, because it can include non-rational human objects and even non-human objects altogether. This essay also argues that a totally egalitarian moral universe, encompassing all human relations, becomes an infinite, totalizing universe, which can easily become the ideological justification (ratio essendi) of a totalitarian regime. [source]


Humanitarian Intervention, Altruism, and the Limits of Casuistry

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 1 2000
Richard B. Miller
This essay argues that the ethics of humanitarian intervention cannot be readily subsumed by the ethics of just war without due attention to matters of political and moral motivation. In the modern era, a just war draws directly from self-benefitting motives in wars of self-defense, or indirectly in wars that enforce international law or promote the global common good. Humanitarian interventions, in contrast, are intuitively admirable insofar as they are other-regarding. That difference poses a challenge to the casuistry of humanitarian intervention because it makes it difficult to reason by analogy from the case of war to the case of humanitarian intervention. The author develops this point in dialogue with Michael Walzer, the U.S. Catholic bishops, and President Clinton. He concludes by showing how a casuistry of intervention is possible, developing a motivational rationale that draws on the Golden Rule. [source]


The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, Issue 2 2003
Stuart Clark
Apparitions were the subject of fierce theological and philosophical debate in the period after the Reformation. But these controversies also raised issues fundamental to the nature and organization of human vision. They crossed and recrossed the boundaries between religion and the science and psychology of optics. Apparitions, after all, are things that appear, and spectres are things that are seen. Before they could mean anything to anyone they had to be correctly identified as phenomena. Their religious role, whether Protestant or Catholic, presupposed a perceptual judgement , essentially visual in character , about just what they were. During the early modern period this judgement , this visual identification , became vastly more complex and contentious than ever before, certainly much more so than in the case of medieval ghosts. The sceptics, natural magicians, and atheists turned apparitions into optical tricks played by nature or human artifice; the religious controversialists and demonologists thought that demons might also be responsible. This essay argues that the debate that ensued, irrespective of the confessional allegiances of the protagonists, was the occasion for some of the most sustained and sophisticated of the early modern arguments about truth and illusion in the visual world. [source]


What Macroeconomic Measures Are Needed for Free Trade to Flourish in the Western Hemisphere?

LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 2 2004
Barry Eichengreen
ABSTRACT Recent experience has made clear the importance of macroeconomic stability, and exchange rate stability in particular, in generating support for regional integration. The tensions created by exchange-rate and financial volatility are clearly evident in the recent history of Mercosur and may also hinder the development of a Free Trade Area of the Americas. This essay argues that ambitious schemes for a single regional currency are not a practical response to this problem. Nor would a system of currency pegs or bands be sufficiently durable to provide a lasting solution. Instead, countries must solve this problem at home. In practice, this means adopting sound and stable monetary policies backed by a clear and coherent operating strategy, such as inflation targeting. With such policies in place, exchange rate volatility can be reduced to levels compatible with regional integration. [source]


Law, Religion, and "Public Health" in the Republic of Brazil

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 1 2001
Paul Christopher Johnson
The essay evaluates the general problem that, while most modern republican constitutions follow the U.S. and French models in declaring religious freedom, absolute religious freedom is impossible and undesirable. How are religious freedoms constrained, and how much should they be? The essay evaluates the strategies by which limitations on freedoms of religion are constructed and imposed, especially the powerful isomorphism of law and science described by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Taking the example of Afro-Brazilian religions in relation to the Brazilian state since 1890, post-emancipation, the essay argues that pseudo-scientific discourses of "public health" constrained the religious practice of former slaves, thus allowing the trompel'oeil of religious freedom to continue in the new republic, even as freedoms were in fact constrained by the state. [source]


The Bishops' Ban of 1599 and the Ideology of English Satire

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2010
William R. Jones
On June 1, 1599, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London banned the further printing of satires, epigrams, and unlicensed histories and plays. Furthermore, the order demanded the immediate recall and burning of specific works, many of which were verse imitations of the Roman satirist Juvenal. Although the order itself lacks specific motivational language, current explanations tend to foreground the potentially obscene and/or libelous nature of the recalled works. Comparatively little attention has been paid, however, to the internal ideologies of the banned satires themselves and to the dialogue between the satires and the cultural and political conditions that inspired them. Instead of an ad hoc response to any one particular transgression, this essay argues for the Ban as an attempt to stem the growing cultural influence of a particularly unorthodox mode of Juvenalian imitative satire expressed most forcefully in John Marston's banned work, The Scourge of Villanie. Marston's rejection of all established belief systems, especially the conservative literary traditions of native English and Horatian imitative satire, in favor of a highly individualistic and indecorous mode of social representation, was simply too ideologically destabilizing for the bishops to tolerate. In support of this reading, two relatively underexplored pieces of evidence are examined: first, the reprieve granted to Joseph Hall's imitative satire entitled Virgidemiarum, which attempts to negotiate an ideologically safe middle-ground between the radical Juvenalian mode and the conservative Horatian tradition; and second, the contemporary reflections on the bishops' prohibition within John Weever's 1599 Epigrams, his 1600 pastoral Faunus and Melliflora, and his 1601 direct attack on Marston in The Whipping of the Satyre. Weever's support of the bishops' actions derives from his identification of the banned Juvenalian mode as not merely morally offensive or personally defamatory, but as a tangible threat to the ideological stability of the English nation. [source]


How to do the History of Heterosexuality: Shakespeare and Lacan

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 4 2010
Will Stockton
This essay argues against two presumptions: first, that the psychoanalytic approach to sexuality is ahistorical; and second, that critics cannot speak of heterosexuality before its 19th-century invention. Looking to Lacanian psychoanalysis, and particularly to Lacan's theory of sexuation (or sexual difference), this essay develops a queer history of heterosexuality premised on the idea that ,heterosexuality' is simply the latest way of describing a structural relation between the sexes. Lacan calls this structure ,the sexual relation', and describes it as a fantasy that man and woman are two halves of the same whole. At the same time, he insists that ,the sexual relation does not exist': that neither sex can actually make the other whole. Lacan's own reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet, focused in part on Hamlet's antagonism toward Ophelia following the prince's discovery of his father's ,castration', offers an example of how to queer heterosexuality in pre-19th-century texts. My reading of Measure for Measure offers a second example, one that likewise evokes Freud's mytho-historical account of the murder of the primordial father and the subsequent creation of a disinterested ,law' in the father's name (Lacan's Name of the Father). This essay concludes by suggesting that the fantasy of the sexual relation falters in both plays on the ,obscene' revelation of the law's/the Father's sinfulness. [source]


The Textual Criticism of Middle English Manuscript Traditions: A Survey of Critical Issues in the Interpretation of Textual Data

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2009
Gavin Cole
This essay is intended to survey two broad issues which determine the use of textual data. The first is the underlying orientation towards the use of textual data and how this relates to critical evaluations of agency, authority and materiality. This essay surveys two broad orientations: (i) an essentially retrospective genetic orientation and, (ii) an orientation which focuses on the phenomenon of change. Both approaches are dependent on the ability to distinguish original readings from scribal readings, identify genetic relationships and account for acts of horizontal transmission. With this in mind, the second issue with which this essay is concerned is the importance of critical interpretation in the categorisation of textual data. This essay argues that textual criticism is a practical demonstration of the difficulties of interpretation and that no textual data ,has any real evidential value until it has been interpreted' (Patterson 90). [source]