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Author: David Oliver Davies
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498532632
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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Book Description
The conversation of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, that most obvious of Milton's additions to the Biblical narrative, enacts the pair's inquiry into and discovery of the gift of their rational nature in a mode of discourse closely aligned to practices of Socrates in the dialogues of Plato and eponymous discourses of Xenophon. Adam and Eve both begin their life "much wondering where\ And what I was, whence thither brought and how.” Their conjoint discoveries of each other's and their own nature in this talk Milton arranges for a in dialectical counterpoise to his persona's expressed task "to justify the ways of God to men." Like Xenophon's Socrates in the Memorabilia, Milton's persona indites those "ways of God" in terms most agreeable to his audience of "men"––notions Aristotle calls "generally accepted opinions." Thus for Milton's "fit audience" Paradise Lost willpresent two ways––that address congenial to men per se, and a fit discourse attuned to their very own rational faculties––to understand "the ways of God to men." The interrogation of each way by its counterpart among the distinct audiences is the "great Argument" of the poem.
Author: David Oliver Davies
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498532632
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197
Get Book Here
Book Description
The conversation of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, that most obvious of Milton's additions to the Biblical narrative, enacts the pair's inquiry into and discovery of the gift of their rational nature in a mode of discourse closely aligned to practices of Socrates in the dialogues of Plato and eponymous discourses of Xenophon. Adam and Eve both begin their life "much wondering where\ And what I was, whence thither brought and how.” Their conjoint discoveries of each other's and their own nature in this talk Milton arranges for a in dialectical counterpoise to his persona's expressed task "to justify the ways of God to men." Like Xenophon's Socrates in the Memorabilia, Milton's persona indites those "ways of God" in terms most agreeable to his audience of "men"––notions Aristotle calls "generally accepted opinions." Thus for Milton's "fit audience" Paradise Lost willpresent two ways––that address congenial to men per se, and a fit discourse attuned to their very own rational faculties––to understand "the ways of God to men." The interrogation of each way by its counterpart among the distinct audiences is the "great Argument" of the poem.
Author: Kimberly Hurd Hale
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498573665
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
This book examines the intersection of fictional narratives and political philosophy, focusing specifically on the use of short stories to teach the classic works of political philosophy. It is a resource for scholars and teachers of politics, philosophy, and literature.
Author: Timothy Haglund
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498575463
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
Francois Rabelais wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel at the height of the Renaissance, when top-caliber thinkers aimed to unite the best of freshly rediscovered ancient Greco-Roman theory and practice and transform politics. Through his work, Rabelais offers his unique understanding of ancient philosophy and political thought. This book considers the role of fortune as the key to understanding Rabelais, much in the manner of contemporaries such as Machiavelli. The two could not be more different, however. Throughout his writings, Rabelais attempts to restore respect for the goddess Fortuna through a cheerful restatement of the case for the sober classical attitude toward future things. As Rabelais’s headstrong character Panurge seeks counsel regarding his marriage prospects, various authorities repeatedly warn him that cuckoldry and spousal abuse await. Panurge looks foolhardy during these admonitions. Far from affirming Machiavelli’s instruction, given in chapter 25 of The Prince, to beat fortune like a woman, Rabelais dramatizes Panurge learning that his future femme may beat him. Through this dramatization, Panurge begins to hear the merits of viewing fortune as an intractable part of life that must be shouldered with the proper inner disposition rather than as an object susceptible of human conquest.
Author: Elizabeth Amato
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498554202
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
The Declaration of Independence claims that individuals need liberty to pursue happiness, but provides little guidance on the “what” of happiness. Happiness studies and liberal theory are incomplete guides. Happiness studies offer insights into what makes people happy but happiness policy risks becoming doctrinaire. Liberal theory is better on personal liberty, but weak on the “what” of happiness. My argument is that American novelists are surer guides on the pursuit of happiness. Treated as political thinkers, my book offers a close reading of four American novelists, Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy, Edith Wharton, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and their critique of the pursuit of happiness. With a critical and friendly eye, they present the shortcomings of pursuing happiness in a liberal nation but also present alternatives and correctives possible in America. Our novelists point us toward each other in friendship as our greatest resource to guide us towards happiness.
Author: Steven Johnston
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498583636
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 125
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Book Description
It’s a Wonderful Life is an American film classic celebrated for its inspirational character. Famously shown during the holiday season, it brings families together in the spirit of mutual love and support. It tells the story of George Bailey, who turns suicidal one Christmas Eve after decades of frustration and sacrifice in which his dreams are repeatedly shattered for the good of others. George is convinced that his life is anything but wonderful. Enter Clarence, his guardian angel, who must find a way to get George to appreciate his family, friends, and all the good he does in life. Clarence does find a way and George returns to his family at film’s close. This might seem like a fairy-tale ending, but it is anything but convincing, which should come as no surprise since the film rehearses an ontological war between contending parties with rival conceptions of what it means to lead a meaningful life. It is a rather one-sided conflict as George finds himself more or less alone in the world. He has been trying to escape his hometown his entire life in order to pursue his Promethean vision in the wider world. To prevent this, God dispatches Clarence to get George to heel. He resorts to a kind of transcendental terrorism to force George to return home and believe it was his own idea. Yet what does it say about a form of life when it resorts to such means to prevail in an existential contest? From a Nietzschean perspective, it is possible to illuminate the film’s extraordinary cruelty. Despite appearances, George’s restoration is temporary at best and there is every reason to believe that eventually he will try to take his life again. Tragically, George must leave Bedford Falls and those who love him must insist that he go.
Author: John S. Nelson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498549489
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
The politics of popular westerns are surprising in substance and significance, especially of late. Cowboy Politics shows how westerns in literature, cinema, and television face the challenges of Western Civilization even more than the perils of American frontiers. Its strategy is to compare key westerns with major theories of modern and postmodern politics. So it analyzes novels from Owen Wister to Zane Grey and Larry McMurtry. It focuses on films from the western revival beginning in the 1990s and featuring Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, while its interest in TV stretches from singing cowboys and Gunsmoke to David Milch’s Deadwood. Critics are apt to find in westerns the modern politics of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. They tap devices of individuality, rationality, contract, sovereign enforcement, and representation to overcome the chaotic violence of a wild zone. Cowboy Politics examines how westerns often find such measures insufficient to tame the West as a culture of honor and anger that deteriorates into feud-al vengeance. Instead westerns see the West as the sunset land that is already growing old and moving on. So westerns seek fresh starts informed by comparing civilizations more than demonizing savages. Westerns worry that modern politics devolve into exploitation, oppression, spectacle, and terror. So they pursue supplements in such postmodern politics as republicanism, perfectionism, populism, feminism, and environmentalism. Especially westerns explore politics of persuasive speech-in-action-in-public, doing beauty, and self-reliance in the modes of Hannah Arendt and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The first two chapters of Cowboy Politics explain how westerns do political theory for popular audiences by making many of our myths: the symbolic stories of individuals and communities which we live daily. The next three chapters trace the initially modern theories of government in many westerns. Then western turns to republican honor, rhetoric, response-ability, and character tracking occupy the following four chapters. And these set the stage for another four chapters on western attention to postmodern terror, mythmaking, celebrity, spectacle, and forgiveness. The final two chapters analyze how “late,” “satirical,” and “transformative” westerns develop realist defenses for their surprisingly postmodern politics.
Author: John Heyrman
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498551939
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
This book analyzes major films about the American political process from the 1930's through the 2010's. Films are grouped historically and analyzed for their portrayal of American politicians and the political system, uncovering patterns and trends regarding the ways that American politics is portrayed. It also explores how politics are reflected in and affected by these films. For example, compromise is often portrayed as a mistake, and heroes generally seek to redeem a corrupt political system. This book categorizes films by how politics are depicted in them (e.g., cynically, idealistically, etc.). This book also considers the depiction of race and gender in films, as well as the ideological slant of the stories told.
Author: Andy Connolly
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498511813
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition offers a fresh reading of the later career development of one of America’s most celebrated authors. Through a contextual analysis of a select number of texts, this innovative study discusses how famed novels such as American Pastoral and The Plot against America demonstrate Philip Roth’s considerable interest in mapping, by means of his unique literary talent, the changing shape and fortunes of American liberalism since the 1930s. By viewing these novels and other seminal works of his later period through a wider historical lens, this book informs readers of the myriad ways in which Roth’s major phase of writing since the mid-1990s has shown considerableconcern with questions of class, ethnicity, race, gender, and literary culture, all of which have been key components in the shifting intellectual and political makeup of American liberal ideology from the New Deal to our present time. This bookgoes beyond a mere historical analysis by taking a new look at how Roth’s experimentations in narrative style and his appeal to ahistorical notions of literary tradition rest in complex alignment with his fictional treatment of aspects of American history. This novel work of criticism demonstrates a heightened awareness of Roth’s career-length fascination with the formal characteristics of fiction, making clear to its audience that any reductively linear reading of Roth as a political novelist should be avoided at all costs. Ultimately, Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition offers a stimulatingly intelligent approach to the art of one of America’s true literary titans, providing the focused reader with a nuanced understanding of how Roth’s fiction has been shaped by the various competing strains in his dual roles as a disinterested formalist aesthete, on the one hand, and as a politically engaged author on the other.
Author: George A. Gonzalez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498591868
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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Book Description
Reality is made up of the Absolute and Causality. The absolute (most saliently philosophized about by Georg Hegel) is where normative values inhere. Causality can be described as the measurable effects of the normative values of the absolute and the laws of physics (also ostensibly a product of the absolute). Humans are special insofar as they access the higher aspects of the Absolute – altruism, compassion, love, humor, science, engineering, etc. The Absolute also contains what can be considered the less attractive values or impulses: greed, lust for power, hate, self-centeredness, conceit, etc. Predicating society on what I deem the lower (spirits) aspects of the absolute (most prominently, greed) results in personal, social dysfunction and ultimately the end of civilization. Conversely, a society based on justice is stable and vibrant. Justice is a classless society, free of gender and ethnic biases. My argument is based on popular culture – especially the Star Trek franchise. One implication of my thesis is that capitalist values generate psychological neurosis and societal instability – even catastrophe. Additionally, the political values that dominate the current neoliberalist world system (and especially the American government) are the other, the will to power – resulting in war, and global political instability. Popular culture is germane to philosophy and contemporary politics because television/movie creators frequently try to attract viewers by conveying authentic philosophical and political motifs. Conversely, viewers seek out authentic movies and television shows. This is in contrast to opinion surveys (for instance), as the formation of the data begins with the surveyor seeking to directly solicit an opinion – however impromptu or shallow
Author: Michelle C. Pautz
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498539130
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
In the movies, government often finds itself in a variety of roles from villain to supporting cast, and rarely, if ever, the hero. A frequent component of that role is the bureaucracy and as documented in Civil Servants on the Silver Screen: Hollywood’s Depiction of Government and Bureaucrats, bureaucrats are routinely found on screen. This book investigates how government bureaucrats are portrayed in the top ten box office grossing films from 2000 through 2015. Perhaps unsurprisingly, government is generally portrayed poorly, while individual government bureaucrats are typically depicted positively. These images of government on screen are particularly important given the ability of movies to influence the attitudes and perceptions of its audiences. The nature of these depictions and potential implications are considered as bureaucrats in film are categorized.
