Borderline experience: madness, mimicry and Scottish gothic

This essay draws on Julia Kristeva's concept of 'borderline' experience, a feature of psychotic discourse, to examine the representation of madness, split personality and sociopathic behaviour in James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and the contemporary, muted Gothic of John Burnside's The Locust Room (2001). The main characteristics of borderline experience - a concern with authenticity and the proper name, with uncertain boundaries between inside and outside, truth and delusion - are central concerns in Hogg and Burnside, and the essay assesses the value of borderline discourse for a critical reading of madness in Gothic

Of saints and sinners

Luke 19:1-10

Pleasure

The history of the political thought on pleasure is not a cloistered affair in which scholars only engage one another. In political thought, one commonly finds a critical engagement with the wider public and the ruling classes, which are both perceived to be dangerously hedonistic. The effort of many political thinkers is directed towards showing that other political ends are more worthy than pleasure: Plato battles vigorously against Calicles' pleasure seeking in the Gorgias, Augustine argues in The City of God against the human tendency to hedonism in favor of a profound distrust of pleasure, and even Machiavelli claims in The Prince that it is in the prince's best interest to separate his pursuit of pleasure from his pursuit of political power. The thrust of the majority of political thought is to interrupt the popular equation that links pleasure with the good. Instead, political thought has largely followed Plato's lead and has worked to contain hedonism on two fronts. First, pleasure is rigorously separated from ethical and political good: what is good is not identical with what is pleasurable even if the two sometimes overlap. Second, even where the pursuit of pleasure is judged to be coincident with the good, pleasure should only be pursued to the degree it is rational to do so and pursued in the most rational way. Of course, it is not true that all thinkers hold to these two positions on pleasure. Epicureanism and utilitarianism are two major schools of thought that challenge the first precept equating pleasure with the good. Both Epicureanism and utilitarianism argue that the only good is pleasure. However, it is much less frequently that one finds a thinker challenging the second Platonic position that reason must master and guide our pursuit of pleasure—even the Epicureans and utilitarians believe that pleasure is best pursued rationally. However, Foucault has attracted recent attention by challenging the idea that reason should dominate the pursuit of pleasure

Tolkien and the Deadly Sin of Greed

Tolkien’s genius as a writer and insight as a philosopher and theologian (of sorts) are reflected in his subtle yet impactful interweaving of the consequences of greed within the lives of the peoples of Middle-Earth. He shows readers that greed is not simply the love of money. Greed is the root of all evil, and it takes a variety of forms, as represented by Sauron’s desire to possess power over and control others, Saruman’s imitative desire, and Feanor’s over-possessiveness of his sub-creative acts. Tolkien also reveals that a proper relationship with nature can provide recovery from the drab familiarity which the appropriation of nature can cause. Ultimately, Tolkien shows that in relinquishing possession of the things and people we most desire, we can find a greater sense of personhood, relationality, and peace within the world

The difficulty surrounding the interpretation of the eighth Bolgia of Dante's Inferno

The final voyage of Ulysses, which is recounted by the Greek hero in the eighth bolgia of Dante’s Inferno, has given rise to much critical debate. An authoritative reading of the episode has been difficult to establish because Ulysses’ monologue appears detached from its context. This occurs as a result of the grandeur of the hero, but also because the voyage seems to have very little in common with what else we hear about the sinners of the eighth bolgia. Depending on whether one looks at the episode of Ulysses, or the episode of Guido – also a sinner in the eighth bolgia – one is likely to come away with entirely different readings of the moral condition of the sinners in this region of Hell. While I do not propose to offer a precise definition of the sin of Ulysses and Guido (for example, fraudulent counsel or misuse of intellect), I would like to suggest that the only manner in which one can approach the sin of the eighth bolgia is through understanding that there is a relationship between the final voyage of Ulysses and the details that we learn elsewhere of the sinners’ lives. It is only through a unified reading of the entire episode that it might be properly understood

Alexander Werdmuller von Elgg

This research aims to describe a condition of college level art education and is composed of two parts: an annotated bibliography and a survey. The annotated bibliography describes dissertations, research papers, articles, and books about histories and current trends in college level art education. The survey asks students and faculty at San Jose State University, California about their extent of value toward a variety of experiences in college level art education. Some key findings from the research are that studio space, expressivity, and craftsmanship are some of the most valuable qualities in college level art education.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/lrsp/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Confucian Puzzle: Justice and Care in Aquinas

Ethical theories of justice and care are often presented in opposition to each other. Eleonore Stump argues that Aquinas’s moral theory has the resources to bring justice and care together. There is, however, a potential worry for her view raised by the ‘Confucian Puzzle’. The puzzle poses a moral dilemma between care and justice that serves as a test case for Stump’s picture. In this paper, I provide a brief overview of the justice and care debate along with the subsequent challenges that both positions face in order to situate Aquinas’s position as Stump defends it. Next, I present the Confucian Puzzle and consider how Aquinas might respond to it. Finally, given his response, I make two claims. First, the unifying virtue of charity enables Aquinas to resolve the tension between justice and care as it appears in the Confucian Puzzle. Second, Stump’s integration thesis only obtains given what Aquinas says about charity

Moral Conflict and Conflicting Liberties

The authors\u27 goal in this chapter is to surface some of the commonalities between belief liberty and identity liberty and to offer some public policy suggestions for what to do when these liberties conflict. She first wants to make transparent the conflict that she believes exists between laws intended to protect the liberty of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people so that they may live lives of dignity and integrity and the religious beliefs of some individuals whose conduct is regulated by such laws. The author believes those who advocate for LGBT equality have downplayed the impact of such laws on some people\u27s religious beliefs and, equally, she believes those who have sought religious exemptions from such civil rights laws have downplayed the impact that such exemptions would have on LGBT people. Second, the author wants to suggest that the best framework for dealing with this conflict is to analyze religious people\u27s claims as belief liberty interests under the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, rather than as free exercise claims under the First Amendment. There were important historical reasons for including the First Amendment in our Constitution, with its dual Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. But the First Amendment should not be understood as the sole source of protection for religious people when the claims such individuals raise also implicate the type of liberty interests that should legitimately be considered under the Due Process Clauses of our Constitution. The authors\u27 argument in this chapter is that intellectual coherence and ethical integrity demand that we acknowledge that civil rights laws can burden an individual\u27s belief liberty interest when the conduct demanded by these laws burdens an individual\u27s core beliefs, whether such beliefs are religiously or secularly based. Acknowledging that these liberty interests exist and can be burdened by civil rights laws does not necessarily mean that such laws will be invalidated or that exemptions from the law will always be granted to individuals holding such beliefs. Rather, as she hopes to demonstrate below, Justice Souter\u27s concurrence in Washington v. Glucksberg offers us a useful approach for engaging in an appropriate substantive due process analysis that provides us with a means of seriously considering the liberty interest at stake without necessarily invalidating the law burdening that interest. Finally, the author offers her own assessment of how these conflicts might be resolved in our democratic system. She has no illusions that either LGBT rights advocates or religious freedom advocates will decide that she has offered the correct resolution. The authors primary goal in this chapter is simply to argue that this conflict needs to be acknowledged in a respectful manner by both sides, and then addressed through the legislative processes of our democratic system. Whether the authors particular resolution is ultimately accepted feels less important to her than helping to foster a fruitful conversation about possible resolutions