What is the role of education in a world where we no longer have a clear vision of the future and where the idea of a single, universal model of humanity seems like the residue of a bygone age? What role should educators play in a world where young people find themselves faced with deep uncertainty about their future, where the prospects of securing a stable, long-term career seem increasingly remote and where intensified population movements have created more diverse communities (...) in which different cultures find themselves living side by side, no longer bound together by the belief that the other would eventually be assimilated into ‘our' culture? Faced with the bewildering features of our liquid modern world, many young people are inclined to withdraw - in some cases into the online world of games and virtual relationships, in other cases into anorexia, depression, alcohol or even drug abuse, hoping to find shelter from a world perceived as more and more dangerous. Others launch into more violent forms of behaviour, like street gangs and the looting carried out by young people who have been excluded from the temples of consumption but are eager to participate in the ceremony. And all this happens while our politicians look on, uncomprehending and indifferent. In this short book Zygmunt Bauman - the leading social theorist of our liquid modern world, here in conversation with Riccardo Mazzeo - reflects on the predicament of young people today and on the role of education and the educator in a world where the certainties of our predecessors can no longer be taken for granted. (shrink)

The Value of Literature provides an original and compelling argument for the historical and contemporary significance of literature to humanity.

A new form of software piracy known as digital piracy has taken the spotlight. Lost revenues due to digital piracy could reach $5 billion by the end of 2005.Preventives and deterrents do not seem to be working – losses are increasing. This study examines factors that influence an individual’s attitude toward pirating digital material. The results of this study suggest that attitude toward digital pirating is influenced by beliefs about the outcome of behavior (cognitive beliefs), happiness and excitement (affective beliefs), (...) age, the perceived importance of the issue, the influence of significant others (subjective norms), and machiavellianism. Given these results, measures can be developed which could alter attitudes toward digital piracy. (shrink)

In a Los Angeles neighborhood plagued by guns, gangs, and drugs, there is a classroom known as Room 56. The fifth graders inside are first-generation immigrants who live in poverty and speak English as a second language. They also play Vivaldi, perform Shakespeare, score in the top 1% on standardized tests, and go on to attend Ivy League universities. Rafe Esquith is the teacher responsible for these accomplishments. Here, he reveals his techniques. The classroom's mottoes are "Be nice, work (...) hard," and "There are no shortcuts." His students voluntarily come to school at 6:30 in the morning and work until 5:00 in the afternoon. They pair Hamlet with rock and roll, learn to handle money responsibly, tackle algebra, and travel the country to study history. This is an inspiring road map for parents, teachers, and anyone who cares about the future success of our nation's children.--From publisher description. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ontological effects of digital technology, and determine whether digital films, traditional films, and pre-traditional motion pictures belong to the same category. I begin by defining the parameters of my inquiry, and then consider the two most significant consequences of the new technology. §2 proposes a decisive refutation of the causal relationship between reality and photography. §3 identifies an end to the dominance of photorealistic film over animation, and argues for an inversion (...) of that relationship, whereby animation is paramount. Finally, I consider the implications of these consequences for film ontology, compare theories, and conclude in favour of Berys Gaut, for whom digital film is the latest incarnation of a history of moving pictures that stretches back for centuries. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a new argument for moderate autonomism. I call this the ‘critical argument’ to distinguish it from the empirical argument of James C. Anderson and Jeffrey T. Dean, and the no-error argument of James Harold. My strategy is to first employ the criticism of Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis to demonstrate the moralist failure to account for the complexity of the relationship between literature and morality, and then offer a more promising alternative. I set out the (...) autonomist, moralist, and immoralist positions in the value interaction debate in §1, and identify problems with classifying the two critics in contemporary terms. In §2 I discuss Arnold’s cultural criticism as both a part of – and a reaction to – the public moralist tradition that dominated Britain in the nineteenth century, drawing attention to his criterion of ‘seriousness’. §3 examines Leavis’ literary criticism, focusing on his conception of the relationship between composition and life, and his criterion of ‘maturity’. Drawing on the similarities between Arnold and Leavis, I demonstrate that their concern with morality differs from that of the contemporary moralists in §4. In §5 I employ John Gibson’s distinction between normative and informative values to complete the argument for moderate autonomism. I test my argument against an extreme case, a hypothetical literary equivalent to The Birth of a Nation, in §6, and conclude that moderate autonomism provides the most compelling solution to the value interaction debate. (shrink)

Early modern conceptions of aesthetic education propose a necessary relation between aesthetic and moral values such that the appreciation of beauty is a necessary condition for the attainment of virtue. Contemporary conceptions retain the causal connection, claiming that the appreciation of literature in particular produces more responsive readers such that the aesthetic merits of novels are moral merits. J. M. Coetzee agrees that there is a relation between the two spheres of value but maintains that the novelist seeking to represent (...) the secret policeman in a society that condones torture is faced with a dilemma: he or she must either portray the torturer by means of cliché and fail aesthetically or... (shrink)

BEYOND DECONSTRUCTION: THE USES AND ABUSES OF LITERARY THEORY by Howard Felperin New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 226 pp., $13.95 (paper).

First published in 1962, Reason and Imagination presents collection of fourteen essays dedicated to Marjorie Hope Nicholson and is divided equally between works of her colleagues and of her former students. It contains themes like noble numbers and poetry of devotion, Cromwell as Davidic King, the isolation of the renaissances hero, Milton's dialogue on Astronomy, music, mirth and galenic traditions in England, the Augustan conception of history, Locke and Sterne, and literary criticism and artistic interpretation, to weave a narrative of (...) the history of ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of literary history, philosophy, comparative literature, and English literature in general. (shrink)

The central dogma of molecular biology dictates that, with only a few exceptions, information proceeds from DNA to protein through an RNA intermediate. Examining the enigmatic steps from prebiotic to biological chemistry, we take another road suggesting that primordial peptides acted as template for the self-assembly of the first nucleic acids polymers. Arguing in favour of a sort of archaic “reverse translation” from proteins to RNA, our basic premise is a Hadean Earth where key biomolecules such as amino acids, polypeptides, (...) purines, pyrimidines, nucleosides and nucleotides were available under different prebiotically plausible conditions, including meteorites delivery, shallow ponds and hydrothermal vents scenarios. Supporting a protein-first scenario alternative to the RNA world hypothesis, we propose the primeval occurrence of short two-dimensional peptides termed “selective amino acid- and nucleotide-matching oligopeptides” (henceforward SANMAOs) that noncovalently bind at the same time the polymerized amino acids and the single nucleotides dispersed in the prebiotic milieu. In this theoretical paper, we describe the chemical features of this hypothetical oligopeptide, its biological plausibility and its virtues from an evolutionary perspective. We provide a theoretical example of SANMAO’s selective pairing between amino acids and nucleosides, simulating a poly-Glycine peptide that acts as a template to build a purinic chain corresponding to the glycine’s extant triplet codon GGG. Further, we discuss how SANMAO might have endorsed the formation of low-fidelity RNA’s polymerized strains, well before the appearance of the accurate genetic material’s transmission ensured by the current translation apparatus. (shrink)

Humankind faces a wide range of threats to its security and safety, from terrorist groups and cybercriminals to disease pandemics and climate change. All these threats share one characteristic: they are constantly changing. Decision-makers can never be sure whether the next tropical storm will be as violent as the last, or whether Taliban insurgents will use a roadside improvised explosive device or a suicide bomber for their next attack. Therefore, many of our security systems — those that are resistant to (...) change, or that try to eliminate all risk — are doomed. Firewalls have failed to protect computers from hackers for 40 years; screening airline passengers for liquids didn't prevent Umar Abdulmutallab from taking a powdered incendiary onto a plane; and so cumbersome is the military procurement cycle that heavy armoured vehicles designed to repel improvised explosive attacks were deployed in Iraq a full three years after soldiers had identified the need. (shrink)

This important new book provides an original and compelling argument for a new theory of aesthetic education. Rafe McGregor proposes a model of interdisciplinary inquiry, applying a combined philosophical and critical approach to illuminate issues in a social science. The book makes an original contribution to the field of narrative criminology.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that narrative representations can provide knowledge in virtue of their narrativity, regardless of their truth value. I set out the question in section 1, distinguishing narrative cognitivism from aesthetic cognitivism and narrative representations from non-narrative representations. Sections 2 and 3 argue that exemplary narratives can provide lucid phenomenological knowledge, which appears to meet both the epistemic and narrativity criteria for the narrative cognitivist thesis. In section 4, I turn to non-narrative representation, focusing (...) on lyric poetry as presenting a disjunctive objection: either lucid phenomenological knowledge can be reduced to identification and fails to meet the epistemic criterion, or lucid phenomenological knowledge is provided in virtue of aesthetic properties and fails to meet the narrativity criterion. I address both of these problems in sections 5 and 6, and I close with a tentative suggestion as to how my argument for narrative c.. (shrink)

This article is an up-dated version of Gordon Brown's ontological approach to education. It tests the hypothesis that Roy Bhaskar's critical realism can successfully underpin education by applying...

The purpose of this essay is to argue that Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Ridley Scott, 2007) has cognitive value which is inseparable from its value as a work of cinema. I introduce the cinematic philosophy debate in §1. §2 sets out my position: that the Final Cut affirms the proposition there is no necessary relation between humanity and human beings. I outline the combination of cinematic depiction with distinctive features of the narrative’s peripeteia in §3. In §4, I explain (...) the cognitive value of the peripeteia. (shrink)

Narrative Justice presents an argument for a contemporary theory of aesthetic education, followed by examples of that theory in practice.1 I use aesthetic education in its strict philosophical sense, that is, as a thesis about the relationship between aesthetic or artistic value on the one hand and moral and political value on the other hand. The crux of the thesis is that there is some kind of causal relation between aesthetic experiences and moral development. The term is ambiguous because an (...) aesthetic education is not an education in aesthetics but an education by aesthetics, specifically a moral education by aesthetic means, which is, in turn, a means to the end of political education.The thesis originates with... (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Francis Hutcheson’s moral sense theory offers a satisfactory account of moral perception. I introduce Hutcheson’s work in §1 and indicate why the existence of a sixth sense is not implausible. I provide a summary of Robert Cowan and Robert Audi’s respective theories of evaluative perception in §2, identifying three problematic objections: the Directness Objection to Cowan’s ethical perception and the aesthetic and perceptual model objections to Audi’s moral perception. §3 examines Hutcheson’s (...) moral sense theory, focusing on his discussion of benevolence, the desire for the happiness of others. I deal with the unresolved issues in Hutcheson’s account by recourse to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary perspective on the moral sense in §4, arguing for the moral sense as the second-order faculty for judging benevolence. I return, in §5, to the objections, showing that moral sense theory solves all three problems and therefore offers a satisfactory account of moral perception. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the literary value of hardboiled detective fiction. I consider two different arguments for literary value, one based on Martin Heidegger's philosophy of art and the other on the tradition of form-content inseparability in literary aesthetics and literary criticism. The former is reliant on the genre's combination of formal complexity with substantive superficiality and the latter on the combination of formal complexity with substantive complexity. I employ Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939) and Nelson DeMille's Plum Island (1997) (...) as examples, focusing on the question of whether they have thematic content. I demonstrate that the novels instantiate substantive themes—about corruption, alienation, and moral amnesia—in consequence of which the argument for form-content inseparability is more compelling. I conclude by suggesting that form-content inseparability underpins both the literary value of hardboiled detective fiction and the genre's capacity for aesthetic education. (shrink)

Gregory Currie is one of the world’s preeminent philosophers of art and a highly-respected philosopher of mind. Imagining and Knowing: the Shape of Fiction is his seventh book, with his conspicuous contributions to the analytic tradition of philosophy including the first systematic philosophical aesthetics in no less than two fields, film (Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science, 1995) and narrative (Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories, 2010). Currie’s trademark approach is the seamless integration of art criticism and (...) aesthetic theory on the one hand with empirical psychology and evolutionary biology on the other and Imagining and Knowing follows suit. His stated aim is twofold: to make a convincing case for the significance of the imagination to the understanding of and engagement with fiction and to make an equally convincing case against the significance of fiction as a source of knowledge. The monograph consists of an introduction, eleven chapters divided into three parts, and a coda. Part I is concerned with making a case for imagining fiction, defending fiction as an utterance over fiction as a genre (Chapter 1) and the role of the imagination in the engagement with fiction (Chapter 2). This role is fleshed out by means of Currie’s conceptions of ‘desires in imagination, or i-desires’ (Chapter 3) and i-emotions (Chapter 4), which also provide neat solutions to both the paradox of fiction and the imaginative resistance debates (56). Part II sets the scene for the case against fictional knowledge, establishing an epistemic taxonomy (Chapter 5), arguing that claims about the cognitive value of fiction should cohere with the findings of experimental psychology (Chapter 6), and debunking evolutionary claims for the significance of fiction (Chapter 7). Part III presents Currie’s deflationary account, tackling each of what he considers to be the four most convincing arguments for learning from fiction in turn: fictional thought experiments (Chapter 8), truth in literature (Chapter 9), the psychology of authors (Chapter 10), and the relationship between fiction and empathy (Chapter 11). (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to defend a particular kind of cinematic realism, anti-illusionism, which is the thesis that cinematic motion is real. Following a brief introduction to realism and cinema in Section 1, I analyse Berys Gaut’s taxonomy of cinematic realism and define anti-illusionism in Section 2. Section 3 contrasts the anti-illusionist theories of Gregory Currie and Trevor Ponech with the illusionist theories of Andrew Kania and Gaut. I reconceptualize the debate in terms of Tom Gunning’s cinematic animation (...) in Section 4, focusing on the question of cinematic singletons. In Section 5 I argue that cinematic singletons both exist and undergo objective displacement—and thus for anti-illusionism. I conclude, in Sections 6–7, with responses to potential objections to my argument from Kania and Gaut. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to defend a deflationary account of the ethical value of narrative representation. In sections 1 and 2 I demonstrate that there is a necessary relation between narrative representation and ethical value, but not between narrative representation and moral value. Ethical is conceived in terms of moral as opposed to amoral and moral in terms of moral as opposed to immoral and the essential value of narrative representation is restricted to the former. Recently, both theorists (...) involved in the ethical turn in criticism and analytic philosophers have erred in conflating these two distinct kinds of value. In sections 3 to 5 I defend my deflationary view against three attempts to elevate the ethical value of narrative representation to moral value: Martha Nussbaum’s theory of realist novels, Noël Carroll’s virtue wheels, and Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s closural moral order. (shrink)

Tzachi Zamir is Professor of English and General & Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he directs the Amirim Interdisciplinary Honors Programme in the Humanities. Just Literature: Philosophical Criticism and Justice is his fifth book, continuing the exploration of the relationship between philosophy and literature begun in Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (2007) and developed in Ascent: Philosophy and Paradise Lost (2017). Aside from his complex and innovative work in this field, he is best-known for (...) establishing the first systematic philosophical aesthetics of the art form of acting in Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self (2014). Just Literature is part of Routledge’s New Literary Theory series, published in the Routledge Focus format. Routledge Focus, like Palgrave Pivot and Emerald Points, is a fairly recent development in academic publishing, featuring short monographs whose publication is expedited in order to be able to provide commentary on or analysis of current events or topical issues. I am not sure about the value of the expedition for academic work, but I am in favour of the format, which is about half the length of a standard monograph and encourages clear, concise, and focused writing. Zamir introduces his unique approach to the overlap of literary studies and philosophy as being a response to the codependence of the aesthetic and epistemic values of literature, expressed in the following three claims: (1) exemplary literature enables insights by means of experiential pathways; (2) aesthetic value and epistemic or cognitive value are often interlinked; and (3) criticism becomes philosophical when it bridges the gap between emotion and insight. The purpose of Just Literature is twofold, to introduce philosophical criticism and to employ philosophical criticism to achieve a better understanding of the concept of justice. The monograph consists of an introduction, five chapters divided into two parts, a coda, and an appendix. The parts are divided by theory and practice, with the first sketching philosophical criticism in more detail than the introduction (Chapter 1) and introducing justice as a concept (Chapter 2). Part II applies this theory to practice, extrapolating the relationships between justice on the one hand and attachment (Chapter 3), pity (Chapter 4), and mercy (Chapter 5) on the other. The coda presents a pithy and memorable conclusion by means of a personal anecdote, recalling the author’s use of the same device in his second monograph, Ethics and the Beast: A Speciesist Argument for Animal Liberation (2007). (shrink)

In this ancient tale of one of the Buddha's past lives, the Buddha is born as a little gray parrot who takes it upon herself to save her beloved forest home from a raging fire. Even though she can only sprinkle drops of water onto the blaze, her perseverance, courage, and compassion change everything, eventually saving the forest in an unexpected way."--Back cover.

Through an examination of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, this book demonstrates the ability of cinematic fictions, and other complex narrative fictions, to contribute to meeting the climate challenge by shaping the desires of audiences. -/- What if there was a single feature film that showed us everything we need to know about climate catastrophe culture? What if that same film also made the philosophies of Slavoj Žižek, Mark Fisher, Francis Fukuyama, and Fredric Jameson accessible? Identifying the climate challenge as (...) a cultural challenge, this book provides an unprecedented criminological analysis of both Children of Men and Fisher’s oeuvre from 1998 to 2022, and demonstrates the capacity of cinematic narratives to shape climate catastrophe culture. Seeking to be part of the solution to the climate challenge, it is the first criminological study to link the capacity of cinematic fictions to shape desire to solutions to the climate crisis. It is also one of the most detailed, and most rigorous criminological case study of a cinematic work to date. -/- Anthropocide: An Essay in Green Cultural Criminology will be of great interest to students and scholars of green criminology, cultural criminology, narrative criminology, film theory, philosophy of film, and ecocriticism. (shrink)

I am both grateful and flattered that colleagues whom I hold in such high regard have taken the time to engage so closely and so thoughtfully with my work. I am particularly pleased that those colleagues have approached Narrative Justice from such distinct perspectives as the intellectual impulse behind its writing was to create a work that was genuinely interdisciplinary and whose insights, such as they are, could be applied to a range of issues across the humanities and social sciences. (...) I cannot hope to respond fully to these engagements in what follows, but I hope that my responses are sufficient to demonstrate the extent of my indebtedness to and respect for the symposiasts.Lewis's perspective on Narrative... (shrink)

Abstract:Frantz Fanon is best known as the author of two monographs: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a literary and psychological account of Black experience and anti-Black racism, and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a political manifesto arguing for the need to respond to colonial oppression with revolutionary violence. His critics contend that the disciplinary division evinces a failure to successfully integrate the psychological with the political, which detracts from his intellectual legacy. In this article, I employ criminologist Jon Frauley’s (...) theory of the analytic value of fictional film to demonstrate that Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) not only provides an empirical referent for Fanon’s psychological and political theories but also reveals an underlying coherence that is not always obvious. I begin with a summary of Frauley’s theory and then alternate between Fanon’s theories and the way in which the film provides those theories with empirical referents. My conclusion, which highlights an essential continuity between individual transcendence and collective action in Fanon, draws on both Blade Runner 2049 and the military tactic of pseudo operations, which was employed to devastating effect against anti-colonial struggles in Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Studies the Renaissance and the 17th century in two ways. The first four essays turn on problems of metaphor and style while the second group are about Machiavelli and Machiavellism and Andrew Maxwell.

There is increasing pressure on the humanities to justify their value and on criminology to undertake interdisciplinary research. In this book, Rafe McGregor establishes a new interdisciplinary methodology, ‘criminological criticism’, harnessing the synergy between literary studies and critical criminology to produce genuine interventions in social reality. -/- McGregor practices criminological criticism on George Miller’s ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’, Prime Video’s ‘Carnival Row’ and J.K. Rowling’s ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, demonstrating how these popular allegories provide insights into the harms of sexism, (...) racism and class prejudice. -/- This book proposes a model for collaboration between literary studies and critical criminology that is beneficial to the humanities, the social sciences and society. (shrink)

Patrick Fessenbecker is Assistant Professor in Cultures, Civilizations, and Ideas at Bilkent University in Ankara. Reading Ideas in Victorian Literature is his first monograph and constitutes a substantial development of the argument he introduced in ‘In Defense of Paraphrase’, the essay that won New Literary History’s Ralph W. Cohen Prize in 2013. The purpose of the book is twofold: to problematize the formalist approach that has achieved hegemony in contemporary literary studies and to offer an alternative way of approaching literary (...) theory and literary criticism, which can be conceived as ‘content formalism’ (p. 29). Fessenbecker provides a humorous but nonetheless accurate summary of his aim as defending the ‘meaning-mongers’ (Joshua Landy’s term) from the ‘form-fetishists’ (p. 17) in order to promote the marginalized tradition of ‘thoughtful reading’ (p. 18). The monograph consists of six chapters bookended by a long introduction and a short epilogue and although it is not divided into parts, two chapters each are devoted to a particular problem with the formalist hegemony in literary studies. The problems are framed in terms of three assumptions that the discipline takes for granted, presented as: form is what makes literature distinctive; the history relevant to literary criticism is the history of form; and aesthetic experience is a property of form. Fessenbecker addresses each of these assumptions by first providing a literary theoretical argument that promotes an alternative approach (Chapters 1, 3, and 5) and then exemplifying that approach by literary critical practice on the novels of Anthony Trollope (Chapter 2) and George Eliot (Chapter 4) and the poetry of Robert Browning and Augusta Webster (Chapter 6). (shrink)

Literary Theory and Criminology demonstrates the significance of contemporary literary theory to the discipline of criminology, particularly to those criminologists who are primarily concerned with questions of power, inequality, and harm. Drawing on innovations in philosophical, narrative, cultural, and pulp criminology, it sets out a deconstructive framework as part of a critical criminological critique-praxis. -/- This book comprises eight essays – on globalisation, criminological fiction, poststructuralism, patriarchal political economy, racial capitalism, anthropocidal ecocide, critical theory, and critical praxis – that argue (...) for the value of contemporary literary theory to a critical criminology concerned with the construction of a just and sustainable reality in the face of climate change and other mass harms. This is the first criminology book to engage with literary theory from the perspective of criminology and provides a guide for criminologists who want to deploy literary theory as part of their research programmes. It supersedes existing engagements with poststructuralism in the philosophical criminological tradition because it entails neither a constructionist ontology nor a relativist epistemology. It shows criminologists how literary theory offers the tools to first deconstruct and then reconstruct meaning and value. -/- Literary Theory and Criminology is essential reading for all critical criminological theorists. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to argue for the value of (1) social science as part of the intellectual activity of writing (rather than righting) and (2) the practice of fiction to that intellectual activity. Writing is a mode of representation that eludes our complete and objective knowledge and always remains partial and temporary. While righting, in contrast, is concerned with the absolute truth and the revelation of the right answer. This paper argues that writing is a more (...) productive, creative, and necessary way of engaging with reality than righting, and that it can offer insights and perspectives for both theory and praxis. Drawing on Stephen King’s view on writing fi ction, this paper will also argue that fiction constitutes a kind of writing and employs a particular form of truth that is conceived as a relation between representation and reality. The paper will conclude by suggesting the need for criminologists— and social scientists more generally—to adopt the perspective of writing to gain a better understanding of the phenomena with which they are concerned. (shrink)