You are browsing the archive for January 2008.
While Children of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón) does in some sense offer a peaceful, hopeful, and politically progressive message, its expression is nonetheless complicated by a utopian, transcendental vision – namely that ‘bare life’ – the ‘miracle of life’ – transcends politics and partisanship alike. This is made iconically clear in the dramatic scene [...]
Clicking through the available portions of Mark David Johnston’s The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull: Lay Learning and Piety in the Christian West (London: Oxford University Press, 1996) I stumbled onto Llull’s concept of affatus, which makes the unusual claim that language is a ’sense’, a sixth sense. Now, while I can’t say that I’m [...]
Cesarotti’s essay on Macpherson, Ossian, and the construction of the folk compilation foregrounds the proleptic – i.e. historically retroactive – effects of the relation between a ‘cultural production’ and the identities produced. My review of Cesarotti’s narrative to this extent concluded with the observation that though Ossian was assembled according to problematic and by no [...]
David asked me to talk about the first 10 chapters of the Bible, and I’ll try to lay some things out, think a little about Leela’s discussion last week, and end by thinking a little about Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, particularly the famous chapter “Odysseus’s Scar,” which compares the narrative styles of Genesis and Homer’s Iliad.
First [...]
Review: Cesarotti, Melchiore. “Historical and Critical Dissertation, Respecting the Controversy on the Authenticity of Ossian’s Poems.” Translated by John M’Arthur. In The Poems of Ossian. Vol. 3, 293–331. New York: AMS Press Inc, 1975. Originally published in Robert MacFarlan, trans., The Poems of Ossian (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1807).
“Blackwell uses a special term to [...]
Review: Emily Deprang, “Confessions of an Ex-Protester,” Texas Observer, 16 November 2007.
* Has ‘political resistance’ ever so openly reveled in its own naivety – or, for that matter, mistaken it for a form of critique?
“When I said I was willing to be arrested, what I really meant was, ‘arrested.’ Arrested for the experience, arrested as [...]
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