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Many Parallels (many + parallel)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Brecht's Pastiche History Play: Renaissance Drama and Modernist Theatre in Leben Eduards Des Zweiten Von England

GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 4 2003
Bruce Gaston
This article examines Brecht's Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England from the historical perspective of its first performances in 1924, paying particular attention to the status of Renaissance drama in Germany and the emerging Modernist movement. This approach runs counter to previous critical discussions which have been implicitly or explicitly comparative. The emphasis on Marlowe has led to a neglect of the many parallels in Eduard II. with works by Shakespeare, works that Brecht, like most educated Germans, would have known. An examination of attitudes to English Renaissance drama during the period leads to the conclusion that Eduard II. is not a criticism of its model, since minimal knowledge of Edward II meant that most of the audience were not in a position to compare the two plays. Rather, the play is a pastiche, a spurious Renaissance history play that emphasised the aspects of Renaissance drama that corresponded to the Modernist aesthetic paradigm, and that also reflected Brecht's own interests and preoccupations. In Eduard II. a Modernist reinterpretation of Renaissance theatre was put up in opposition to the orthodox view of Shakespeare, and thus embodied a challenge to the dominant theatrical tradition which had claimed Shakespeare as its own. [source]

Globalisation and New Zealand: Anchoring the Leviathan in a Regional Context

NEW ZEALAND GEOGRAPHER, Issue 2 2003
LUCY BARAGWANATH
ABSTRACT Despite its ambiguity and contentiousness, the term globalisation is widely used in New Zealand, as it is elsewhere, in analyses of contemporary times. Yet the concept of globalisation is frequently invoked at a high level of generality with little consideration of the specificities of the particular contexts to which it is applied; and in the case of New Zealand, the notion seems incongruous in many respects. We therefore seek to anchor the notion in the regional context of Canterbury, where our historical and ethnographic research leads us to suggest that globalisation is a misleading and contentious description of contemporary New Zealand. As a set of discourses, however, globalisation is pervasive and powerful. The contemporary policy climate strongly reflects the hegemonic discourse of hyperglobalism, which emphasises generic globality, novelty and change at the expense of continuity and the particularity of place, limiting the possibilities for action. Thus while empirically, many parallels with the past persist, nevertheless, contemporary policy-makers understand New Zealand's options as determined by globalisation as an external force. This contrasts with past policy discourses which emphasised the scope for domestic decision-making, within the context of inextricable connections with the outside world. Our emphasis on the discursive construction of the globalisation imperative draws attention to possible alternative interpretations of New Zealand's contemporary options. [source]

Between Pinochet and Kropotkin: state terror, human rights and the geographers

THE CANADIAN GEOGRAPHER/LE GEOGRAPHE CANADIEN, Issue 3 2001
John Wiley Lecture
The lecture develops a civil perspective on states engaged in systematic but arbitrary armed violence against their home populations: what the Nürnberg Tribunal called ,government by terror. Civilians, or most of them, appear uniquely vulnerable to such violence and the gross violations of human rights accompanying it. Moreover, this, rather than wars as usually understood, involved the largest uses of armed force in the twentieth century. It was the main cause of violent death of civilians. Two geographical concerns are addressed: the ,geographic' nature of such violence, and its implications for the thought and practice of geographers. They are explored especially through the work of two geographers whose lives bracket the past ,century of violence, Peter Kropotkin and Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile fully illustrates the scope of state terror. Geographies of coercion are seen in the system of political prisons and torture, the making of a society and landscapes of fear, and the unmaking of civil life. The atrocities also violated Chile's former commitment to human rights initiatives. Pinochet's geographical work, especially the geopolitics, is in accord with, or offers no counter to, the repressive, authoritarian regime he headed, Kropotkin's descriptions of imperial Russia show many parallels to the Chilean case, and the kind of repressive state power that he rejected to dedicate his life to its vulnerable and innocent victims. Almost alone among geographers he developed a coherent, influential vision of violence, social justice and interpersonal ethics, based on geographical investigations as well as an anarchist perspective. These two may also seem to represent conceptual and lived extremes - respectively, an extreme deployment of state violence, and a total rejection of the state because of the facts and potential of violent repression. Unfortunately, enquiries into violence and the state, let alone terrorist states, are virtually absent from contemporary geographical scholarship. Its emergence as an essentially ,civil field' has reinforced this - when it should have had the opposite effect. In part this involves a failure to temper our long, and less-than-critical, service to the state in all areas, and a continuing governmental mind-set. It is suggested that the absence of critical reflection on the contested relations of civil society and the state, especially as they involve state violence, undermines the intellectual value and ethical standards of our work. [source]

Stereotype Threat and Race of Interviewer Effects in a Survey on Political Knowledge

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2003
Darren W. Davis
Social desirability is generally thought to underlie the propensity for survey respondents to tailor their answers to what they think would satisfy or please the interviewer. While this may in fact be the underlying motivation, especially on attitudinal and opinion questions, social desirability does not seem to be an adequate explanation for interviewer effects on factual questions. Borrowing from the social psychology literature on stereotype threat, we test an alternative account of the race-of-interviewer effects. Stereotype threat maintains that the pressure to disconfirm and to avoid being judged by negative and potentially degrading stereotypes interferes with the processing of information. We argue that the survey context contains many parallels to a testing environment in which stereotype threat might alter responses to factual questions. Through a series of framing experiments in a public opinion survey and the reliance on the sensitivity to the race of the interviewer, our results are consistent with expectations based on a theory of "stereotype threat." African American respondents to a battery of questions about political knowledge get fewer answers right when interviewed by a white interviewer than when interviewed by an African American interviewer. The observed differences in performance on the political knowledge questions cannot be accounted for by differences in the educational background or gender of the respondents. [source]