Today's pre-service teachers grew up attending schools where high stakes testing and teacher accountability were the norm. Despite a substantial body of research focused on the influence high-stakes testing on the practices of novice social studies teachers, a gap exists regarding the accountability movement's influence on novice social studies teachers. This study focused explicitly on the influence high-stakes testing and the culture of accountability had on two pre-service social studies teachers during their student teaching experience. Our findings highlight the ways (...) the accountability culture of public schools served a narrow gatekeeping function, limiting what participants learned during student teaching. Rethinking gatekeeping during student teaching within the current era of accountability and oversight positions teacher educators to confront the constricting nature of student teaching today. Student teachers must learn to recognize the gatekeeping aspects of the accountability culture and to make sense of the contradictions embedded in the student teaching experience. (shrink)

Transactions in the U.S. garage sale range from the commercial to the giftlike, in a Maussian sense. As two-thirds of the participants, women create a sense of community through garage sale exchange. This article explores how women, partly differentiated along lines of race and class, solidify their personal relationships, transmit something of themselves with their possessions, transform their own lives in the process, and contribute to a broader spirit of community through the generalized reciprocity and even moral economy that manifests (...) in giftlike exchange. There is an important link, both material and symbolic, between women's relational skills, their association with the home and the moral, and the creation of community in the garage sale. (shrink)

This article draws upon affect theory to analyze transformations of garage sale sellers through the exchange of their affectively charged possessions. Garage sales are awash with human emotion; they feature used personal belongings suffused with identities, histories, stories, and memories that are moved along with affect. The objects for sale are “sticky” in that they act as vessels and glue for strands of sentiment to reflexively pass between sellers and buyers, transmitting affective orientations, whether positive or negative. The affective elements (...) of garage sale goods are contagious as they can intersubjectively leap from one body to another. (shrink)

The critical look at hospice care by Felicia Ackerman in Vol. 6 of the CambridgeQuarterly requires a response, since the author presents her view as having major implications for health policy. As a healthcare executive with over 25 years experience, and as a spokesperson for both my own program and others in the National Hospice Work Group, twelve of the nation's largest nonprofit hospices, I submit that her analysis of hospice care is naive. Ackerman's lack of practical understanding concerning the (...) care of the terminally ill results in a discussion that misses the key policy issues. (shrink)

This paper describes the first three-year experience of the Consortium Ethics Program (CEP-1) of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Medical Ethics, and also outlines plans for the second three-year phase (CEP-2) of this experiment in continuing ethics education. In existence since 1990, the CEP has the primary goal of creating a cost-effective, permanent ethics resource network, by utilizing the educational resources of a university bioethics center and the practical expertise of a regional hospital council. The CEP's conception and specific (...) components stem from recognition of the need to make each hospital a major focus of educational efforts, and to provide academic support for the in-house activities of the representatives from each institution. (shrink)

In Clinical Ethics, Robert Timko argues that the moral dilemmas of clinical medical practice can best be resolved within a framework of prima facie duties, and that the most stringent duty is that of nonmaleficence. Timko shows that respect for individual autonomy and the principle of beneficence are inadequate for the moral practice of medicine since simple adherence to either principle may be insufficient for the provision of "due care.".

A discussion of ethical decision-making literature is overdue. In this article, we summarize the current literature of ethical decision-making models used in mental health professions. Of 1,520 articles published between 2001 and 2020 that met initial search criteria, 38 articles were included. We report on the status of empirical evidence for the use of these models along with comparisons, limitations, and considerations. Ethical decision-making models were synthesized into eight core procedural components and presented based on the composition of steps present (...) in each model. This taxonomy provides practitioners, trainers, students, and supervisors relevant information regarding ethical decision-making models. (shrink)

Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

This article presents the Pilgrimage Model as a template for educators wishing to lead students on site-specific studies of engaged learning. During the 2015–2016 academic year, a group of Georgeto...

_Humanizing Education_ offers historic examples of humanizing educational spaces, practices, and movements that embody a spirit of hope and change. From Dayton, Ohio, to Barcelona, Spain, this collection of essays from the _Harvard Educational Review_ carries readers to places where people have first imagined—and then organized—their own educational responses to dehumanizing practices and conditions. Contributors include Montse Sánchez Aroca, William Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Fernando Cardenal, Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade, Marco Garrido, Jay Gillen, Maxine Greene, Kathe Jervis, Nancy Uhlar Murray, Valerie (...) Miller, Wendy Ormiston, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, Vanessa Siddle Walker, Arthur E. Thomas, and Travis Wright. (shrink)

Each of these hospice officials makes several criticisms of my paper, Philosophy of Hospice I will treat these criticisms in turn.

Since 9/11, citizens of all nations have been searching for a democratic public philosophy that provides practical and inspiring answers to the problems of the twenty-first century. Drawing on the wisdom of past and present pragmatist thinkers, Judith M. Green maps a contemporary form of citizenship that emphasizes participation and cooperation and reclaims the critical role of social movements and nongovernmental organizations. Starting with empowering processes of storytelling, truth and reconciliation, and collaborative vision-questing that allow individuals to give voice and (...) new meaning to their loss, anxiety, and hope, Green frames cooperative inquiries to guide transformative actions. From this "second strand" of the democratic experience, leaders and participating citizens can help to shape a more desirable democratic future. In dialogue with Richard Rorty, Judith Butler, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl, Cornel West, and other contemporary thinkers, Green defines the need for deeper understanding and fulfillment of the potentials of the democratic ideal. Drawing insights from Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, William James, John Dewey, Jane Adams, and other earlier thinkers, Green frames a pragmatist understanding of emerging realities and possibilities, growing wells of shared truths, multifaceted histories, and mutually transformative experiences of citizenship. Employing examples from America's complex history and from recent world events, Green locates four sites for effective citizen activism: government at all levels, nonprofit organizations, issue-focused campaigns and social movements, and daily urban living. Green shows how citizens can revive social hope and deepen the democratic experience by drawing on their own knowledge and developing their capabilities through inclusive civic participation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Air of Liberty:A Transatlantic PerspectiveKieran M. Murphy (bio)"En somme le rôle du critique serait sans cesse de faire de l'air dans le plein du monde mais non pas forcement de faire du vide."—Roland Barthes"Dèyè mòn, gen mòn" ["Behind mountains, there are mountains"]—Haitian proverbThe phrase "I can't breathe" has become a worldwide rallying cry against injustice. Ben Okri deems "I can't breathe" the "mantra of oppression" that should "spark (...) the real change our world so desperately needs." He attributes the phrase's remarkable impact to how it taps into our primal fear of suffocation, encouraging empathy for "seemingly insignificant people." He also brings attention to how, as a slogan, "I can't breathe" subverts institutional racism through poetic means: "Not even William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin or Toni Morrison at their most eloquent came out with anything as simple in the genius of its truth as: 'I can't breathe.'" This truth is airborne: "'I can't breathe' suddenly equates racism with the deprivation of air, which is what it always was." The chokehold of racism emerged with the transatlantic slave trade and, Okri concludes, has been ever since the prohibition of breathing "freedom."The powerful convergence of poetics and politics in the slogan "I can't breathe" comes from its essential truth: the aerial nature of freedom. More than just a concept or metaphor, freedom is also something you breathe. Freedom is a kind of concept-image that depends on our intimate, life-sustaining relationship with the atmosphere. "I can't breathe" brings attention to this relationship to help redress the failure of our institutions to bestow freedom equally.The aerial nature of freedom is even more apparent in the related slogan "the air of liberty." References to "the air of liberty" occurred frequently during the French Revolution to convey the origin of the "human rights" that have become the bedrock of our democratic institutions. Today, these human rights continue to exert their legal weight for the defense of equality. Yet, when confronted with the evasive mechanism of institutional racism, they keep falling short. This predicament is partly due to [End Page 200] their supposed airtight foundation. "The air of liberty" offers a window to the turbulent time when human rights sprang conspicuously from the atmosphere, that we can reopen to shift the focus from the legal to the aerial origin of freedom. This strategy unleashes historical winds that swept across the Atlantic world, including a critical undercurrent from the Haitian Revolution that prefigured the "I can't breathe" movement and its critique of the white chokehold on freedom. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Detail of Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier, Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, circa 1789 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)The best-known depiction of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Fig. 1) portrays the origin of liberty in a scene unfolding in the sky. Spreading its light and dissipating the clouds of error, the Enlightenment's eye of reason levitates like an aerostat. Its liberating power illuminates the law symbolized by a winged figure pointing to the tablets below containing the articles proclaiming that "men" are born free and equal. Despite the prominence given to the eye of reason, it is in the atmosphere in which it elevates that we must look for the elemental spring of liberty.References to the aerial nature of liberty most intriguingly surfaced in contemporary debates concerning the universality of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The revolutionary and abolitionist Jacques Pierre [End Page 201] Brissot characterized the 1791 slave rebellion that ravaged the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) as a fight for a purer, healthier air. In a speech delivered the same year at the National Assembly, he argued that, following the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the "atmosphere" of inequality hovering over the plantations of Saint-Domingue had become noxious not only for the enslaved but also for the troops that France might dispatch to restore order in the colony... (shrink)

This book is good reading. It is the song of man and philosophy, more especially the song of America and American philosophy. Although there are intimations of latter-day weariness and cynicism, the spirit of this work is the spirit of America in her youth, conscious of her newness, with visions of unlimited possibilities--the America of Emerson, Whitman, James, and Dewey.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in DialogueDavid M. JohnsonChristopher Gill. Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. vii 1 510 pp. Cloth, $85.Gill’s book is a wide-ranging attempt to improve our understanding of Greek poetic and philosophical thinking about the self and its role in ethics. His thesis is that the Greeks had an “objective-participant” model (...) of personality which is different in important ways from the various “subjective” and/or “individualist” models which have often formed the basis of modern interpretations. While the subjective understanding of the person privileges a unitary first-person perspective in a Cartesian way, Gill argues that the Greeks—as do some modern thinkers—speak of an interplay between parts that is best studied from the outside. The individualist strand of thought makes individual autonomy a keystone of morality in a way indebted to Kant; Gill argues that the more communal mode of ethics advocated recently by Williams and MacIntyre is closer to the Greek ideal. Gill is surely right that Cartesian and Kantian assumptions have had a distorting effect on some readings of Greek texts, and he has made important progress by presenting a different framework based on modern work touching on Greek thought about ethics and the self.After an introduction spelling out his objective-participant framework Gill devotes his first chapter to Homeric decision-making and a critique of the interpretations of Snell and Adkins. It is a mistake, he argues, to make self-consciousness the criterion for a full-blown concept of the self or for what counts as moral decision making. Homeric deliberations are closer in form to Aristotle’s thinking about decision making and the modern action theory which has reasons (whether conscious or not) replace the will as the basis for action. Nor are the Homeric heroes rightly criticized for allowing shame and their status to be considerations in their decision making; as Williams has argued, internalized shame can be a rather effective ethical motivator, and as both he and MacIntyre have argued, there is much to be said for allowing one’s place in society to inform one’s decision making. Gill’s argument here does not seem particularly novel, as his frequent citation of Williams and MacIntyre makes clear, but he does apply it thoroughly to four important Iliadic monologues in a way which clarifies these ideas and confirms their relevance for Homer.The second chapter provides an analysis of why we feel sympathy for the problematic heroes of Greek epic and tragedy, particularly Achilles and Medea, despite their controversial deeds. Here Gill rejects the views of Bradley and Butcher, who argued that it was the power of the character’s self-conscious personality that won us over, and the structuralist view of Redfield, who made [End Page 119] Achilles a mediator between the need to protect society and the desire for personal glory. Gill interestingly—and originally, as far as I know—argues that it is rather the hero’s acting out of an ethically exemplary gesture, based on implied or explicit second-order reasoning about the best sort of human life, that gains our interest and sympathy. For Gill it is important that the hero’s ethical position fall within the communal framework of his or her society: Achilles’ refusal to return to the fight is his way of showing how Agamemnon has undermined the code of heroic reciprocity; Medea’s murder of her children is, even more paradoxically, her means of showing Jason the importance of the bonds of philia.Taking Achilles as our example, Gill rejects the view of Parry and Whitman that Achilles’ heroism is deeply subjective. Gill argues that Achilles, in his great speech of book 9, is not rejecting the heroic code itself but only Agamemnon’s perversion of it. While this reading makes good sense of much of Achilles’ speech in Iliad 9, it is difficult to square with the end of the speech, in which Agamemnon seems to have faded from view, leaving Achilles to question the heroic code itself. This is not to say that Achilles puts... (shrink)

Most recent writing linking science and literature has concerned itself with challenges to the epistemological status of scientific knowledge in an attempt to demonstrate its contingency, arguing in the more radical efforts that the structures of science are no more than useful fictions. This essay also includes an epistemological comparison between science and literature, but instead of making grand or meta–statements about the nature of knowing generally in the two fields, mine is a much narrower aim. My exploration entails two (...) tasks. First, I provide a close–up look at a particular type of experiment, called the delayed–choice experiment, which clearly reveals the strangeness of the quantum world. In connection with this experiment, I discuss wave functions—mathematical expressions used by physicists to describe quantum behavior and predict the outcome of experiments involving quanta. Second, I look at Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself” focusing on the meaning of the “self” in the poem. My aim is to treat the object of study in each field as a “text” and to assert and demonstrate a parallel in the strategies of thought and response between physicists (“readers”) pondering the meaning and status of a wave function and poem readers pondering the meaning and status of the poem's self. In Whitman's “Song” we find an attempt to understand complex aspects of human experience that are said to transcend ordinary reality, an effort for which I believe there are parallels in the attempts of modern physicists to understand complex, nonintuitive aspects of the subatomic world. While not making the kind of broad claims eschewed above, I do suggest that this focused study has interesting implications since both the wave function and the poem's self force their respective sets of “readers” to confront questions of ultimacy—to consider, that is, epistemological and ontological issues of more than passing interest to students of science as well as those of metaphysics and theology. (shrink)

There is a difference between the private and social cost of preserving the past. While it may be privately rational to forget the past, the social cost is significant: we fail to see that Classical political economy is a polemic against racism. The past is a rich source of surprises and debates, and resources on the Web are uniquely suited to teaching such wide-ranging debates. Our ASecret History of the Dismal Science on the web, provides a rich series of windows (...) on the literary and analytical texts, and the artwork, that figured in the debates. Students who read Smith juxtaposed with Whitman, who read the Carlyle-Mill exchange, and who see these images, understand the debate the way a student who reads only the Wealth of Nations, Ricardo's Principles, or John Stuart Mill cannot. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:George J. Leonard EMERSON, WHITMAN, AND CONCEPTUAL ART The widespread abandoning of the art object at the end of the 1960s was taken as something radically, even frighteningly, new, by critics and artists alike. Objects, concept artist Joseph Kosuth was asserting by 1969, are "irrelevant" to art. Though an artist might choose, as in the past, to "employ" objects, "all art is finally conceptual." In fact it was (...) now time that the object, nothing more than the "physical residue" of the artist's mental activity, was dispensed with.1 "We / open our eyes and ears seeing life / each day excellent as it is," John Cage chanted: "This / realization no longer needs art...."2 Aestheticians as disparate as Murray Krieger and Harold Rosenberg reacted to this "transfiguration of the commonplace," as Arthur Danto has called it. Danto has gained a wide scholarly audience for his ideas about the 1960s as "the end of art," or at least as the beginning of "post-historical art."3 We know from such works as Renato Poggioli's TL· T^ry oftL· Avant-Garde that, in this century, particular movements have routinely declared themselves to be art's climax.4 Critics like Jacques Barzun and artists like Amedee Ozenfant had been saying for years that art was exhausted. Yet conceptualism's attack on the object struck most critics as something both alarming and new: Irving Sandler wrote in a special edition of the College Art Association's Art Journal devoted to the problem that it demolished "every notion of what art should be,"5 and Murray Krieger feared that this "leap beyond Pop Art" would "complete the obliteration of the realm of art, its objects, its museums...."6 But the conceptualist attacks on the art object were, in fact, not new. One can find attacks as scathing in Emerson and Whitman; so scathing, that criticism has rarely taken them seriously. The attacks the concep297 298Philosophy and Literature tualists mounted in the 1960s were only the culmination ofan intellectual tendency which appeared throughout the West one hundred and sixty years before. It has long been a scholarly commonplace that after 1800 an "intellectual tendency"—as M. H. Abrams finallytermed it—extolling the possibilities of this world emerged in all parts of Western culture. When itappears in literature we nowusually call it, withAbrams, Natural Supernaturalism; or, with Harold Bloom, the "visionary company." Man, Wordsworth decreed, can and must learn to find "Paradise" in "the common day."7 Surprisingly litde work has been done on what happened when this intellectual tendency, Natural Supernaturalism, confronted the art object. Emerson and Whitman can stand for many who were necessarily ill at ease with the idea of art objects as elite objects superior to the common things it was their mission to extol. Wordsworth works before these two; Ruskin develops similar ideas into greater complexity; but since Emerson writes clear expository prose and avoids fanciful terminology, he makes a good place to enter this dark wood. Let us begin with some straightfor-ward, overdue interdisciplinary history, reading Emerson on the art object, noticing similar passages in Whitman, and noting where Emerson has reworked Hegel for his own ends. For Emerson objects are but thought's "inert effect," as for the concept artist Kosuth they would be but the "physical residue" of the artist's activity. Emerson and Kosuth, opposite Shakespeare, do not applaud the art process as the giving to an airy nothing a local habitation and a name; rather they disdain the stuff as petrifactions, as dead mud footprints left by living thoughts diat have raced away.8 In his essay "Circles," Emerson derides our admiration for a work of architecture, directing us to the "litde waving hand" that built it, for "that which builds is better than that which is built." By the same logic, the invisible thoughts which truly wrought the object were even better than the hand and "nimbler."9 When such passages are discussed at all, they are usually considered Platonic,10 but, in his essay "Art," Emerson envisions a use for art objects Plato would have blinked at. For the time being, art objects have a particular "office" to fill. That office, Emerson wrote in... (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. In the history of early American philosophy, the movement of American transcendentalism occupies a special place. Its peculiarity was that it combined great literature, idealistic philosophy and an irrational worldview. Exploring the phenomenon of nature in their philosophical reflections, American transcendentalists turn to the cosmic levels, endowing the universe with mind and soul. M e t h o d s. The article uses the method of historical-philosophical reconstruction to reproduce the (...) context of the emergence of American transcendentalism, the hermeneutic method for the interpretation of philosophical texts, with the aim of revealing the ideas of the universe, micro- and macrocosm, as well as consciousness, which are conveyed through symbols and metaphors. For a comprehensive consideration of various aspects of the philosophy of American Transcendentalism as a whole system, a comparative method and a systemic analysis integrating ideas about the cosmos, consciousness and metaphysical principles were involved. R e s u l t s. The image of the "transparent eye-ball" of R. W. Emerson, described in the essay Nature (1836), symbolizes the state of complete fusion of man with nature, when the personal "I" disappears, giving way to the perception of the universe. The eye of the American transcendentalist is directed towards the cosmos, it passes through all reality, emphasizing the deep connection between man and the cosmos. On the other hand, the unity with nature is thoroughly researched and tested in the solitude experiment of H. D. Thoreau. In his work Walden (1854), H. D. Thoreau describes the desire for unity with nature, separating himself from society and immersing himself in life alone with nature. His experiment demonstrates how a simple, contemplative life can lead to a deeper understanding of oneself and the Universe. In addition, the space poetry of W. Whitman, especially the collection Leaves of Grass (1855), is full of tropes of the cosmos, where space and time are perceived as a single whole, and the images of the Earth and heavenly bodies are interconnected with the human soul, creating a symbolic picture of the unity of humanity with the boundless universe. C o n c l u s i o n s. American transcendentalism was not only a literary movement, but also a powerful philosophical trend that contributed to a deeper understanding of the relationship between man and nature in particular, and the cosmos and spiritual forces in general. Transcendentalist philosophers, such as R. W. Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, and W. Whitman, interpreted the cosmos not only as a physical space, but also as a symbol of a higher truth that man can approach through the harmony of consciousness with nature. American Transcendentalists emphasized inner knowledge, intuition, and spirituality, which remain relevant today, as do calls for living in harmony with majestic nature. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. This article explores American transcendentalism as a philosophical, literary, and social movement of the 19th century that shaped a unique intellectual tradition in the United States. The central theme is the examination of the interplay between transcendentalist ideas, utopian social experiments, and individual spiritual quests. Particular attention is given to the works of R. W. Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, W. Whitman, and other key figures of the movement. The purpose (...) of the article is to highlight how the transcendentalists combined philosophical theory with the practical implementation of their ideas through social experiments and literary creativity. M e t h o d s. The analysis employs an interdisciplinary approach, integrating the method of historical-philosophical reconstruction and the hermeneutic method. The method of historical-philosophical reconstruction was used to recreate the social, cultural and intellectual context of American transcendentalism. The hermeneutic method, on the other hand, enabled the interpretation of the works of American transcendentalists, uncovering philosophical concepts related to nature, individualism, and society. Additionally, comparative analysis was utilized to examine the commonalities and differences between the utopian experiments of Brook Farm and Fruitlands and the philosophical ideas of the movement. R e s u l t s. The study revealed that transcendentalism had a profound influence on the development of American philosophy and literature. Social experiments such as Brook Farm and Fruitlands reflected aspirations to create a harmonious society but also highlighted the tensions between ideals and reality. The analysis of H. D. Thoreau's philosophical experiment at Walden Pond emphasized the potential for self-sufficient living in alignment with the principles of individualism and unity with nature. W. Whitman's works demonstrated innovative ways of expressing transcendentalist ideas through poetic imagery of harmony between humanity and the Universe. C o n c l u s i o n s. While transcendentalism had internal contradictions, it left a lasting impact on the intellectual history of the United States. Its ideas of individualism, spiritual growth, and harmony with nature influenced not only its contemporaries but also subsequent generations of thinkers and writers. The social experiments of the movement illuminated the practical challenges of implementing utopian ideas while underscoring the importance of seeking new forms of societal coexistence. The article emphasizes the relevance of transcendentalist ideas in contemporary discussions of ecology, individualism, and social justice. (shrink)

Introduction, by H. J. Cargas.--St. Paul and Teilhard de Chardin, by J. H. Adams.--Teilhard and Dante, by M. Gable.--Tennyson and Teilhard, by E. R. August.--Teilhard, neo-Marxism, existentialism, by M. Barthelemy-Madaule.--Whitman, Teilhard, and Jung, by R. Benoit.--C. G. Jung and Teilhard de Chardin, by N. Braybrooke.--Camus and Teilhard, by P. Rosazza.--Bonhoeffer and Teilhard, by C. M. Hegarty.--Voices of convergence: Teilhard, McLuhan, and Brown, by D. J. Leary.

A review‐article of Loren Baritz, City On a Hill, A History of Ideas and Myths in America, John Wiley and Sons C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism, Paine‐Whitman Publishers Roderick M. Chisholm, Herbert Feigl, William K. Frankena, John Passmore, Manley Thompson, Philosophy, Prentice‐Hall Max Black, Philosophy in America, Cornell University Press.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bob Dylan’s “Highway Shoes” The Hobo-Hero’s Road through ModernityTodd Kennedy (bio)In the final verse of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (1963), the speaker proclaims, “I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe / where I’m bound, I can’t tell.” With no destination in sight, he seems content to remain on a perpetual, isolated journey on what he terms “the dark side of the road.” Such an ethos (...) of movement, which permeates Dylan’s corpus, mirrors a dissident strain of American culture that seeks to find a Jeffersonian, individualistic freedom via movement through space outside of mainstream society. As early as Bringing It All Back Home (1965), peaking with Blood on the Tracks (1975), and persisting into his most recent work, Dylan has consistently merged aspects of blues, country, and literary traditions, to invoke images of mobility that examine individual freedom in a world where technology, fragmentation, and homogeneity seem to result in a destructive dehumanizing of individuals. In so doing, Dylan uses an intensely innovative aesthetic as he ambivalently romanticizes uprooted wandering in a manner that both mirrors and expands upon what I term an ontology of the hobo-hero that permeates American letters from Walt Whitman to John Dos Passos (and beyond) as it glorifies those who remain in constant motion in order to maintain a sense of integrated self in the face of crushing modernity.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari similarly identify such an ontology within American culture when they, in A Thousand Plateaus, declare America a “special case” defined by its ceaseless search for a “rhizome,” or a “space in which two things that have nothing to do with one another form a parallel constructed by the mind. It is not imitation or resemblance, but becoming” (10). For Deleuze, Guattari, and, as I argue, Bob Dylan, the rhizome occupies a singular place within American letters. In other words, Deleuze and Guattari admit that America “is not immune from [...] the search for roots” in its “quest for a national identity or even for a European ancestry or genealogy (Kerouac going off in search for his ancestors),” yet they adamantly assert,every thing important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome [...]. American books are different from European books, even when Americans set off in search of trees. The conception of the book is different. Leaves of Grass. And directions in America are different: the search for arborescence and the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers.(19) [End Page 37]Such an assertion should come as no surprise, I would argue, since, beginning with the earliest attempts to define “America,” Americans have seen their identity linked to mobility. In fact, the lone commonality that Americans share is descent from immigrants who came to the United States from a “home” or “homeland” where cultural identity was not far removed from national identity. It would stand to reason, therefore, that a group of uprooted individuals thrust into a self-declared melting pot would begin to define themselves by their dislocation. For instance, eighteenth-century French immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur claimed that, within the American continent, “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men” (44) as America represents, for Crèvecœur, an “asylum” in which “the poor of Europe have by some means met together” (42). Crèvecœur proceeded to privilege those people, such as farmers, who planted “roots” as they helped to build and improve their society, but Crèvecœur’s assertion that we are united by our mutual uprootedness proves indicative of what critic Robert James Butler has observed as a recurrent American “quest for pure motion” (80, emphasis in original). Or, one encounters what the novelist John Steinbeck claimed he perceived in “nearly every American”: a “burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here” (10). It is such an attempt for perennial rebirth through movement, a rhizomatic selfhood, that... (shrink)

This paper aims to present a critique of naturalistic theories of violence. The context of this critique concerns the naturalization of violence, which induces the assimilation power as a form of violence. Therefore, we resumed the theses of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault on power and violence. The goal is not to list the differences between these authors on the subject, which are explicit in the development of the test, but show their concordance regarding the critique of power as something (...) synonymous with violence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public LifeDavid GormanPoetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, by Martha C. Nussbaum; xii & 143 pp. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, $20.00.This volume, a revision of lectures given in 1991, is a philosophical study comparing aspects of law and literature. The law in question is contemporary American case law (hence the reference to “Public Life” in the book’s subtitle). The literature (...) to which it is juxtaposed consists primarily of “realist social novels” (p. 87), represented chiefly by Dickens’s Hard Times, though with some attention also given to E. M. Forster’s Maurice, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and to passages from Whitman’s poetry (quoted, characteristically, at some length). Nussbaum’s thesis is that both this kind of legal discourse and this kind—or kinds—of literary discourse constitute, involve, or otherwise rely upon an imaginative vision of human life and its possibilities. Thus lawyers have a great deal to learn from literature, insofar as contact with the capacious imaginations of a Dickens or a Whitman can only enlarge the sensibilities of those who read them in a sufficiently open-minded, reflective way.It may be both too kind and overly reductive to ascribe to Poetic Justice such a thing as a thesis. On the contrary, this compact book, like all of Nussbaum’s writings, teems with theories and theses. This is the main reason, I suppose, for the dichotomy of responses to Nussbaum: some find this pullulating quality of her work exhilarating, while others just find it annoying. One advantage that I think both parties will recognize in the compactness of Poetic Justice (due to the constraints of the lecture format) is that it inhibits the author’s native prolixity, which makes her previous books—The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Love’s Knowledge (1990), and The Therapy of Desire (1994)—something of an effort even for Nussbaum’s biggest fans to stay with through every last qualification, tertiary argument, and cross-reference. [End Page 196]The opening pages of these lectures seem, if anything, all too simple. Nussbaum’s initial target is the economistic, deterministic school of social analysis associated with the University of Chicago generally and with Richard Posner in particular, which has lately exercised a disproportionate influence in American jurisprudence and—especially during the Reagan-Bush era—in public policymaking. Against this kind of thinking, which attempts to treat human beings and their actions and decisions as much as possible in terms of quantifiable, statistical measures, Nussbaum emphasizes the autonomy, the irreducible singularity of each human being and the qualitative aspects of each person’s experience, which is the kind of cautionary lesson that she sees literary works as driving home—hence their value as a counterweight, or even a vaccine, against reductive economism. Thus readers will tend to assume from the first lecture (“The Literary Imagination”) that what they are in for, pretty much, is something like Bob Cratchit’s comeback to Ebenezer Scrooge. The Dickensian comparison is not fortuitous, of course, because although the text of reference is Hard Times and not A Christmas Carol, the moral antithesis is familiar enough: a coldly, blindly all-embracing utilitarianism versus a warm, empathetic humanism.Yet, as Nussbaum develops her account, things are not so simple. What emerges is that her aim is not simply to mount an attack on the economic-determinist approach to analyzing (and thus judging) human behavior, but in the first place to understand it, to get inside this worldview. This empathetic response to Chicago-style social analysis, in turn, weaves itself into the texture of Nussbaum’s book in two ways. For one thing, it supports her call to treat literature as making a potentially significant contribution to public life, since what better path can there be to understanding neo-utilitarians like Posner than via imaginative portrayals of such paleo-utilitarians as Mr. Gradgrind? For another thing, moreover, the very gesture of trying to empathize with economic determinism rather than trying to bury it serves the purpose of showing up the latter’s limitations, because this kind of other-directed response is just what the utilitarian approach is least... (shrink)

In January 1969, just before his inauguration as president, Richard M. Nixon attended a concert in his honor at Constitution Hall. The program consisted entirely of works by American composers, including Howard Hanson, then the director of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. Hanson's choral work “Song of Democracy,” a setting of two excerpts from poems by Walt Whitman, was the last number of the evening. Here isNew York Timesmusic critic Harold Schonberg's commentary on the (...) event, which featured the National Symphony Orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir:“Song of Democracy” is not a very original or strong piece, but it makes a big brave sound in its concluding measures, and the well-trained Mormon Tabernacle Choir had a lusty time with it... Mr. Nixon listened intently, but grinned his way between numbers. At the end of the Hanson work, he was determined to be the first to applaud. He brought his fist down in a great downbeat, anticipating the conductor's by a good half measure.Afterwards, Schonberg reported, Nixon left the presidential box to congratulate Hanson personally. (shrink)