Small and Large Cultures: Individuality, the Collective, Conformity and the Period of the Cold War

The Cold War is something I analyze in two parts.  First, I examine its politics, including political literatures and cultures large and small that concentrate on central concerns of the Cold War. Second, I discuss small and minor literatures in the period of the Cold War in theory and practice, including examples from the Netherlands and Canada that are in the period of the Cold War but do not focus on it as its primary concern or theme.  In these sections,  I argue for the centrality of the tension between tyranny and liberty, individual and the group, conformity and nonconformity and related matters. The article ranges in the politics of the Cold War from the background of Marx and Mill though Churchill, Stalin,  Truman, McCarthy to Russell, Grant and Ignatieff.  In literature, that is the Cold War in ink,  the essay analyzes Orwell’s essay on the nuclear bomb and his novels,  Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm as well as  Miller’s play, The Crucible and a poem by Einstein on Russell.  I concentrate on examples of Dutch fiction and their translation into English  and a Canadian novel,  The Weekend Man, by Richard B. Wright,   because they are an element of  “minority literatures.”   Besides  exploring the Cold War, I  briefly examine theories of minor or small literatures, including some aspects of the views of Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari

George Orwell: The English dissident as Tory anarchist

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 The Author.This article examines the nature of George Orwell's Tory anarchism, a term that he used to describe himself until his experiences in Spain in 1936. The argument developed here says that the qualities that Orwell felt made him a Tory anarchist remained with him throughout his life, even after his commitment to democratic socialism. In fact, many of those qualities (fear of an all-powerful state, respect for privacy, support for common sense and decency, patriotism) connect the two aspects of his character. The article explains what the idea of a Tory anarchist means, describing it as a practice rather than a coherent political ideology, and moves on to examine the relationship between Eric Blair, the Tory anarchist, and George Orwell, the democratic socialist. It makes the case for his Tory anarchism by drawing out recurring themes in his work that connect him to other Tory anarchist figures such as his contemporary Evelyn Waugh. Thus Tory anarchism is presented as a conservative moral critique of the modern world that can connect figures who hold quite radically different political beliefs

Cottage Economy or Collective Farm? English Socialism and Agriculture Between Merrie England and the Five-Year Plan

The cottage economy and the collective farm are two alternative models of socialist agriculture that relate broadly to the traditions of Romantic and utilitarian socialism and embody diametrically opposed attitudes to food and its production. In the decades following the Russian Revolution of 1917 – at a time when collectivised agriculture was being implemented on a previously unimaginable scale, with disastrous consequences – the case for such a model was made enthusiastically by British Stalinists such as George Bernard Shaw, Jean Beauchamp, Margaret Cole, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. This fed into a wider shift in British society where responsibility for securing the food supply was increasingly seen as a function of the state rather than the market. During the inter-war decades the centre of gravity for British socialists’ thinking about food production shifted from the cottage economy to the collective farm. Yet there were those – like Chesterton, Belloc, Orwell and Muggeridge, as well as the emerging thinkers of the organic movement like Louise Howard and G. T. Wrench – who in various ways held on to the cottage economy ideal and the peasant smallholder as a bulwark against the vast, industrialised mega-farms of the Soviet Empire. They were often seen not as socialists but as cranks. This paper explores the debates around this issue and considers their continuing relevance to our own thinking about the ways food is produced

Binge and Emotional Eating in obese subjects seeking weight loss treatment

Objective: Binge Eating Disorder (BED) is highly prevalent among individuals seeking weight loss treatment. Considering the possible trigger factors for BED, different studies focused on the role of emotional eating. The present study compared threshold, subthreshold BED, and subjects without BED in a population of overweight/obese individuals seeking weight loss treatment, considering the anamnesis, the eating disorder specific and general psychopathology, the organic and psychiatric comorbidity, the emotional eating as a trigger factor for binge eating, and the quality of life. Design: cross-sectional survey.Subjects: Four hundred thirty eight overweight subjects seeking weight loss treatment have been enrolled in the study. Measurements: Subjects have been evaluated by means of a clinical interview (SCID I) and different self-reported questionnaires (Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire, Binge Eating Scale, Beck Depression Inventory, Spielberg's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Symptom Checklist 90, Emotional Eating Scale, and Obesity Related Well-Being questionnaire). Results: One hundred and five subjects (24% of the sample) fulfilled the DSM-IV criteria of lifetime BED, 146 (33.3%) fulfilled the criteria of lifetime subthreshold BED, and 187 (42.7%) subjects were diagnosed overweight non-BED. No correlations between the binges frequencies and the overweight levels were found. All the three groups showed high psychiatric comorbidities, and the three groups significantly differed in terms of emotional eating, which was positively correlated to the binge eating frequencies. Conclusions: Threshold and subthreshold BED deserve a careful psychopathological investigation and emotional eating seems to play a key role as trigger factor for binge eating. Obesity is associated with a high psychiatric comorbidity and a low quality of life, independently from the specific and general eating disorder psychopathology

Virtual histories and counterfactual myths: Christopher Priest's the separation

For the abstract, please see the PDF file

Introduction to Constellar Theory in Multicultural Education Pedagogy

The majority of education and social science ideas subscribe to a hierarchical ideology that not only necessitates but also obligates an always-already dialectic. Such a dialectical fetish and intellectual relegation is grounded in Marxist ideology, which has influenced a vast majority of cultural studies and social science theories. Constellar Theory challenges the hierarchical model ideology in concept and pedagogy to complicate and exhibit a more intricate matrix of considerations to move the multicultural education discourse in possible new directions