Menorah Review (No. 31, Spring, 1994)

A Noble Past? -- Freud Frenzy... -- Fictive Relations in Fiction -- Another Trip -- Dilemmas of an American Jewish Journalist -- Rock of Ages -- Book Briefing

The Chicago Counter-Revolution and the Sociology of Economic Knowledge

This chapter is concerned with the internal phenomenon. One model that can be invoked to explain this internal phenomenon is the classical process whereby evidence is patiently accumulated until the weight of the argument favours one side or another. Alternatively, Stigler\u27s \u27model\u27 of the sociology of economic knowledge construction and destruction can be used to examine the internal opinion-changing process in the transition from the overwhelming defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 to the overwhelming victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980 - two men with essentially the same programme and the same message (Friedman and Friedman 1982, viii). ISBN: 033373045

Becoming Nothing, Becoming Everything: Quantum Posthumanism and the Writing of J.M. Coetzee

Drawing on both posthumanism and quantum theory, this thesis introduces what I am calling a framework of quantum posthumanism. Based on the epistemic and ontic aspects of entanglement, nonseparability, and becoming, and a reworking of ideas of agency and objectivity, the thesis embarks on an interdisciplinary (entangled) reading of J. M. Coetzee’s texts that seeks to move beyond the current historicist framing of his work. Utilising some of the key concepts and laws from various quantum interpretations, it seeks to show how such concepts effectively deconstruct boundaries between self/other, human/animal, animate/inanimate, body/environment and therefore, by extension to the literary, between fact/fiction, story/history, external/internal, and ultimately author/character/reader/text. The thesis approaches Coetzee’s writing by focussing on the centrality in his fiction of becoming, not only on the level of characters, but also in terms of the agencies of meaning within the literary event (the transactions amongst reader, author, and text). Quantum posthumanism deconstructs the fixed role and positionality of the external observer/Cartesian subject, represented as the reader/author outside the literary event. It proposes the term phenomenon of meaning to address the entanglement of reader/text/author that become part of the meaning they claim to own. The thesis also challenges traditional uses of concepts such as time, linearity, and origin with quantum posthumanist ideas such as multiplicity, emergence, contingency, and parallelism. Finally, through the framework of quantum posthumanism, the thesis hopes to support the argument for the entanglement of human knowledge and the detrimental illusion of the divide between the humanities and the sciences by demonstrating and exemplifying how inevitably entangled human knowledge is

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 55 Number 4, Summer 2014

20 - A DAY WITH THE DALAI LAMA photos by Charles Barry, Noah Berger, and Michael Collopy . Close-ups and long views from the spiritual leader’s Feb. 24 visit. 24 - THE CATHOLIC WRITER TODAY by Dana Gioia. The poet, critic, and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts argues that Catholic writers must renovate and reoccupy their own tradition. At stake: the diversity and vitality of the American arts. 38 - OUR STORIES AND THE THEATRE OF AWE an interview with Marilynne Robinson. The Pulitzer Prize–winning writer speaks with Editor Steven Boyd Saum about grace, discernment, and being a modern believer.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/sc_mag/1029/thumbnail.jp

Negative Estrangement: Fantasy and Race in the Drow and Drizzt Do’Urden

This essay introduces the concept of negative estrangement to help understand current cultural interventions into the norms of depicting fantasy races. First, this essay builds on Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement to describe the literary practice of negative estrangement, wherein artists craft “more evil” foes based on hybridized amalgamations of stereotypes to create antipathy toward a subject, be it monster or fantasy race. This practice is sometimes used in service of confronting the issue of race and racism, despite seeming to reify or rearticulate racist stereotypes. This essay builds on Tolkien’s argument in favor of creating “more evil” foes to exemplify heroic action from Tolkien’s essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” as part of the structure of negative estrangement. It also builds on the sense of how, as Helen Young describes, fantasy can seem safer for the cultural work of exploring issues of race due to its apparent rhetorical distance from the real world. In allowing the non-realistic reification of fantasy races, the issue of racism can be addressed substantively without audience rejection. The work of R. A. Salvatore is productive as a case study to understand this literary practice. R. A. Salvatore has written over 30 novels focusing on the dark elf, “drow,” character of Drizzt Do’Urden. In his writing, Salvatore demonstrates a fundamental paradox between the desire of artists to craft anti-racist narratives and the need to depict “evil” fantasy races in mass market action fantasy prose. Since 2020, the Wizards of the Coast game Dungeons & Dragons has been in the process of active revision and rewriting its handling of fantasy races. Part of the purpose of this essay is to highlight the ways that the fantasy genre is continuing change its handling of the depiction or conception of fantasy races

Soundings: the Newsletter of the Monterey Bay Chapter of the American Cetacean Society. 2010

(PDF contains 92 pages.

The Trail, 1963-03-28

https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/thetrail_all/1868/thumbnail.jp