Critical dialogues: slow readings of English literary texts

The reader will find gathered together in this volume a selection of articles and essays that have been separately published over the past three decades as a result of my teaching practice and research activity. In chronological terms, they span a period from 1985 until May 2008. These texts were chosen because they are considered to be representative of the type of work I usually do in my classes, undoubtedly as a result of my own academic background, based on a deliberate and specific form of approach to literary texts, my own choice of English authors and, lastly, my most recent interest in inter-art studies.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologi

The novel and the nation: the case of David Grossman's see under: love

While Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is a crucial reference point in studies of the relations between the novel genre and the nation, it is often forgotten that he locates the link between the two in a particular "apprehension of time". The first part of this article returns to Anderson's thesis in order to show that, as different tendencies in contemporary literary studies have recognized, the critical potential of the novel genre lies in its ability to construct a different apprehension of time. The second part of the article applies this insight to the case of David Grossman's See Under: Love (1986). While Grossman's novel is routinely recognized as a major intervention in Israel's national imaginary, and especially in the way the nation related to the Holocaust, this reading underlines that such an intervention is made possible by its reorganization of the 'timing' of the nation. A close reading of the novel reveals that it stages and dismisses two different 'timings' of the nation, while it constructs a different temporality that affirms rather than dismisses or trivializes the paradoxical simultaneity of the past and the present. This operation is related to the tradition of so-called "secular messianism", which was famously instantiated in the work of Walter Benjamin. As Anderson's thesis on the link between novel and nation is itself explicitly indebted to this aspect of Benjamin's work, this reading of Grossman's novel demonstrates the continuing relevance of Anderson's thesis for an understanding of the novel genre's critical potential

Robert Shaw Conducts Franz Joseph Haydn The Creation, March 1, 1998

This is the concert program of the Boston University Chamber Orchestra and Symphonic Chorus performance of The Creation by Franz Joseph Haydn on Sunday, March 1, 1998 at 3:00 p.m., at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Avenue. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

René Girard’s Reflections on Modern Jihadism: An Introduction

This paper aims to offer a comprehensive overview of René Girard’s reflections on the issue of modern jihadism. It addresses three key aspects of his reasoning: (I) the rise of Islamic terrorism in the context of a globalization of resentment; (II) modern jihadism understood as an “event internal to the development of technology;” (III) the hypothesis that modern jihadism “is both linked to Islam and different from it.

Bakhtin\u27s Dialogism and the Corrective Rhetoric of the Johannine Misunderstanding Dialogue: Exposing Seven Crises in the Johannine Situation (Chapter

One of the most fascinating thinkers and literary theorists within the last century is the late Russian form critic Mikhail Bakhtin, whose theory of dialogism seeks to account for several levels of dialectical tension and interplay in great literature. On one level, Bakhtin observes the “heteroglossic” character of language. Between its centrifugal uses in popularistic culture and the centripetal actions of philologists and grammarians attempting to standardize meanings and associations, living language is always in a state of flux. On another level, Bakhtin suggests that discourse is always “polyphonic.” Because meanings reverberate against each other upon their utterance, transmission, and reception, the making of meaning is itself a dialogical reality. On a third level, when ironic misunderstanding is used in novelistic prose, Bakhtin asserts this feature is always rhetorical

Early Music Series Concert: A Schubert Birthday Concert, January 27, 1997

This is the concert program of the Early Music Series Concert: A Schubert Birthday Concert on Monday, January 27, 1997 at 8:00 p.m., at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Avenue. Works performed were the following by Franz Schubert: Der Alpenjäger, Die Forelle, Der Wanderer, Der Atlas, Sonatina for Violin and Piano in D major, Op. 137 No. 1, D. 384, An die Musik, Gesänge des Harfners I, Gesänge des Harfners II, Rastlose Liebe, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Auf dem See, D. 543, Der Tod und das Mädchen, D. 531, Im Frühling, D. 882, Auf der Bruck, D. 853, Allegro in A minor ("Lebensstürme") for piano four hands, D. 947, Duet "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt," and Trio "Das Abendroth." Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Considering the Classroom as a Safe Space

In the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, Lauren Freeman (2014) advocates that faculty turn their classrooms into “safe spaces” as a method for increasing the diversity of philosophy majors. The creation of safe spaces is meant to make women and minority students “feel sufficiently comfortable” and thereby increase the likelihood that they pursue philosophy as a major or career. Although I agree with Freeman’s goal, I argue that philosophers, and faculty in general, should reject the call for turning classrooms into “safe spaces.” I begin by distinguishing extra-curricular safe spaces from the classroom as a safe space. I then argue that although faculty should not object to extra-curricular safe spaces, they should reject curricular ones. I argue that the classroom as a safe space is currently an impractical and inappropriate goal given the nature of academic philosophy, and that encouraging students to think of classrooms as safe/unsafe does not facilitate learning. Nonetheless, I agree with Freeman that faculty should take steps to ensure that students from all backgrounds have the tools they need to be successful in the classroom. I further argue that faculty calls for safe spaces creates confusion concerning the educative environment one should expect to find at the majority of America universities

Middle-East Journal of Scientific Research 15 (5): 613-617, 2013

The artistic peculiarities of the transformation of mythological plot about Endymion in the works by Hugh Donald Barclay, Oscar Wilde, Stephen Phillips are investigated. The author reasearches distinguished features of each literary version. Wilde's aestheticism is of peculiar interest. Both Barclay’s and Wilde’s versions create an alternative fate of Endymion in the Victorian society. Phillips’s version is an attempt to revive the ancient Greek original myth in details to acquaint the Victorian readers with the ancient human values. An active creative reconsideration of a mythological material in the context of the national and historical conditions of the Victorian epoch and continuity of the Elizabethan love discourse are considered as basic tendencies of functioning of English poetic endmionada in the XIX-th century