Author: Jeffrey A. Hanson File Type: pdf Soren Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling is one of the most widely read works of Continental philosophy and the philosophy of religion. While several commentaries and critical editions exist, Jeffrey Hanson offers a distinctive approach to this crucial text. Hanson gives equal weight and attention to all three of Kierkegaards problems, dealing with Fear and Trembling as part of the entire corpus of Kierkegaards production and putting all parts into relation with each other. Additionally, he offers a distinctive analysis of the Abraham story and other biblical texts, giving particular attention to questions of poetics, language, and philosophy, especially as each relates to the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Presented in a thoughtful, well-informed, and fresh manner, Hansons claims are original and edifying. This new reading of Kierkegaard will stimulate fruitful dialogue on well-traveled philosophical ground.

Author: Harsha File Type: pdf Two tragic plays that break the rules both show the hero dying on stage, a scenario forbidden in Sanskrit dramaturgy. King Harshas play, composed in the seventh century, re-examines the Buddhist tale of a magician prince who makes the ultimate sacrifice to save a hostage snake (naga). The Shattered Thighs, attributed to Bhasa, the illustrious predecessor to ancient Kalidasa, transforms a crucial episode of the Mahabharata war. As he dies from a foul blow to the legs delivered in his duel with Bhima, Duryodhanas character is inverted, depicted as a noble and gracious exemplar amidst the wreckage of the fearsome battle scene.

Author: Juan Pablo Scarfi File Type: pdf International law has played a crucial role in the construction of imperial projects. Yet within the growing field of studies about the history of international law and empire, scholars have seldom considered this complicit relationship in the Americas. The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas offers the first exploration of the deployment of international law for the legitimization of U.S. ascendancy as an informal empire in Latin America. This book explores the intellectual history of a distinctive idea of American international law in the Americas, focusing principally on the evolution of the American Institute of International Law (AIIL). This organization was created by U.S. and Chilean jurists James Brown Scott and Alejandro Alvarez in Washington D.C. for the construction, development, and codification of international law across the Americas. Juan Pablo Scarfi examines the debates sparked by the AIIL over American international law, intervention and non-intervention, Pan-Americanism, the codification of public and private international law and the nature and scope of the Monroe Doctrine, as well as the international legal thought of Scott, Alvarez, and a number of jurists, diplomats, politicians, and intellectuals from the Americas. Professor Scarfi argues that American international law, as advanced primarily by the AIIL, was driven by a U.S.-led imperial aspiration of civilizing Latin America through the promotion of the international rule of law. By providing a convincing critical account of the legal and historical foundations of the Inter-American System, this book will stimulate debate among international lawyers, IR scholars, political scientists, and intellectual historians. **

Author: Rebecca L. Walkowitz File Type: pdf In this broad-ranging and ambitious intervention in the debates over the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of cosmopolitanism, Rebecca L. Walkowitz argues that modernist literary style has been crucial to new ways of thinking and acting beyond the nation. While she focuses on modernist narrative, Walkowitz suggests that style conceived expansively as attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness helps to explain many other, nonliterary formations of cosmopolitanism in history, anthropology, sociology, transcultural studies, and media studies.Walkowitz shows that James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and W. G. Sebald use the salient features of literary modernism in their novels to explore different versions of transnational thought, question moral and political norms, and renovate the meanings of national culture and international attachment. By deploying literary tactics of naturalness, triviality, evasion, mix-up, treason, and vertigo, these six authors promote ideas of democratic individualism on the one hand and collective projects of antifascism or anti-imperialism on the other. Joyce, Conrad, and Woolf made their most significant contribution to this critical cosmopolitanism in their reflection on the relationships between narrative and political ideas of progress, aesthetic and social demands for literalism, and sexual and conceptual decorousness. Specifically, Walkowitz considers Joyces critique of British imperialism and Irish nativism Conrads understanding of the classification of foreigners and Woolfs exploration of how colonizing policies rely on ideas of honor and masculinity. Rushdie, Ishiguro, and Sebald have revived efforts to question the definitions and uses of naturalness, argument, utility, attentiveness, reasonableness, and explicitness, but their novels also address a range of new ethnicities in late-twentieth-century Britain and the different internationalisms of contemporary life. They use modernist strategies to articulate dynamic conceptions of local and global affiliation, with Rushdie in particular adding playfulness and confusion to the politics of antiracism.In this unique and engaging study, Walkowitz shows how Joyce, Conrad, and Woolf developed a repertoire of narrative strategies at the beginning of the twentieth century that were transformed by Rushdie, Ishiguro, and Sebald at the end. Her book brings to the forefront the artful idiosyncrasies and political ambiguities of twentieth-century modernist fiction.**From Publishers WeeklyEnglish professor and anthology editor Walkowitz argues in this muscular literary criticism that novelists Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro and W. G. Sebold shared a telling skepticism about political commitments defined by national culture, and about efforts to specify and fix national characteristics. Expressed not only in the content of their work, the writers argued through their stylistic techniques, including wandering consciousness, paratactic syntax, recursive plotting collage and portmanteau language. Using close reading, Walkowitz considers each novelist on his own terms and the terms of culture at large for example, Conrads nominal devotion to naturalness hides more complex and decidedly unnatural forces competing in his work, including a number of narrative tricks that reveal practices of social perception, identifying both characters and readers perhaps unconscious reduction of individuals to cultural types. Woolfs work suggests that political engagement in an international context requires, somewhat paradoxically, the willingness to embrace uncommitted styles of attention, including evasion and anti-heroism, in order to resist the politics of imperialism. In part two, Walkowitz explores treason in the work of Ishiguro and Rushdie-which suggest that steadfast allegiances are neither possible nor desirable-as a tactic of immigrant writing and antifascist descent. Unapologetically academic, this is a dense and detailed argument that will appeal to serious scholars of modernist thought and the authors that have shaped it. Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. ReviewRecommended.(Choice) A valuable book... Walkowitz deserves our praise for her openness, her ambition, and her willingness to take on so demanding a critical task.(Dominic Manganiello James Joyce Literary supplement 1900-01-00) creative and refreshing (April Bullock Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 1900-01-00)