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Rabelais’s Contempt for Fortune
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 179

Rabelais’s Contempt for Fortune

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 Rabela...

Reason’s Inquisition
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 279

Reason’s Inquisition

Theory and practice, reason and revelation, ancients and moderns are the key themes running through the eighteen studies of the literature of political philosophy in Reason’s Inquisition. Alfarabi is a pivotal figure, but the range is wide, from Plato and Thucydides to Shakespeare and Hobbes, extending to such contemporary figures as Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin.

The Final Frontier
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 259

The Final Frontier

The proposed book uses the Star Trek television/movie and Star Wars movie series to explain key international relations (IR) concepts and theories. It begins with an overview of the importance of science fiction in literature and film/television. It then presents the development of the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, and discusses how their progression through time has illustrated key IR theories and concepts. As a bonus, it compares the two franchises to another recent science fiction franchise used to teach IR (Battlestar Galactica).

AIDS-Trauma and Politics
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 185

AIDS-Trauma and Politics

AIDS-Trauma and Politics considers American literary representations of the social and political silence surrounding the AIDS crisis in the U.S. in the 1980s. The book offers close readings of such authors as Paul Monette, Mark Doty, Rafael Campo, Sarah Schulman, Tony Kushner, and Larry Kramer in order to argue that the AIDS crisis was born largely without a witness and, as a result, marks a significant trauma in U.S. history. Grounded by trauma studies, AIDS-Trauma and Politics argues that the arts, exemplified here by literature and film, uniquely underscore social problems otherwise overlooked by such discourses as politics, the law, and journalism. Defining the 1980s AIDS crisis as a perfect case, this book proposes to redefine trauma not simply as an event that happened too soon, but rather as an ongoing series of oversights resulting in a failure to acknowledge or witness the humanity of those who suffer.

The Coen Brothers and the Comedy of Democracy
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 133

The Coen Brothers and the Comedy of Democracy

Both critically and commercially successful filmmakers, the Coen brothers have written, produced, and directed numerous acclaimed films over the past three decades. Sara MacDonald and Barry Craig demonstrate that their comedies, in particular, which are often dismissed as mere entertainments, actually present substantial philosophic and political arguments. They examine five of the Coen brothers’ comedies: Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou, and Hail Caesar!. In those works, they discover insightful engagements with such ideas as questions of human freedom, the relationship of reason to religion, and the nature of liberal democracy in the American regime. They demonstrate how sometimes explicitly, but generally implicitly, the Coens draw on thinkers such as Homer, Plato, Dante, and Hegel, while simultaneously presenting popular entertainment.

Theology and Geometry
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 203

Theology and Geometry

This collection, the first of its kind, brings together specially commissioned academic essays to mark fifty years since the death of John Kennedy Toole.

Flannery O’Connor and the Perils of Governing by Tenderness
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 201

Flannery O’Connor and the Perils of Governing by Tenderness

Flannery O’Connor’s fiction continues to haunt American readers, in part because of its uncanny ability to remind us who we are and what we need. Foss’s book reveals the extent to which O’Connor was a serious reader of the history of political philosophy. She understood the ideas upon which the American regime rests, and she evaluated those ideas from the standpoint of both faith and reason. Foss’s book explains why O’Connor feared that the modern habit to govern by tenderness would lead to terror. After a thorough account of her familiarity with the history of political philosophy, Foss shows how the works of Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, ...

Updike and Politics
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 282

Updike and Politics

Presenting the first interdisciplinary consideration of his political thought, Updike and Politics: New Considerations establishes a new scholarly foundation for assessing one of the most recognized and significant American writers of the post-1945 period. This book brings together a diverse group of American and international scholars, including contributors from Japan, India, Israel, and Europe. Like Updike himself, the collection canvases a wide range of topics, including Updike’s too often overlooked poetry and his single play. Its essays deal with not only political themes such as the traditional aspects of power, rights, equality, justice, or violence but also the more divisive elements in Updike’s work like race, gender, imperialism, hegemony, and technology. Ultimately, the book reveals how Updike’s immense body of work illuminates the central political questions and problems that troubled American culture during the second half of the twentieth century as well as the opening decade of the new millennium.

Rabelais's Contempt for Fortune
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 178

Rabelais's Contempt for Fortune

Although he writes in a different genre than most other political thinkers, Francois Rabelais's contribution to political philosophy carries weight because of his famous humor and unique style, which provide sharp insight into the limits of human agency and throw doubt on the more "serious" projects of his peers.

Baudelaire Contra Benjamin
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 235

Baudelaire Contra Benjamin

This book offers the first sustained argument against the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and his readings of Charles Baudelaire. More broadly, it is also a critique of politicized aesthetics and cultural Marxism, of which Benjamin is a pioneering and emblematic figure. Cristaudo and Beibei argue that Baudelaire was not mistaken in refusing to subject aesthetics to morality and politics. Baudelaire’s refusal was based on the recognition that existential matters, such as sickness, evil, death, sexual longing, melancholy, and beauty itself—all themes at the center of his poetry—are by nature intrinsically supra-political. By contrast, Benjamin’s faith in political redemption, while break...