The birds and the bees : gender performance in Grandville's Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux

Published between 1840 and 1842, J. J. Grandville’s Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux is a hybrid work of satirical allegory that stages the scandals, polemics, and power struggles of the July Monarchy through a collection of illustrations by Grandville and stories written to accompany them. The printed image significantly disrupted artistic hierarchies of the period and sparked heated debates about both the expertise of illustrators and the possibilities of the image, described by Philippe Kaenel as an “instrument of seduction”. Scholarly engagement with Scènes des animaux has all but ignored gender, yet the increased visibility of women in the publishing industry during the July Monarchy permanently altered the terms of modern artistic legitimacy. In this paper, I demonstrate that gender has been conceptualized, represented, and reified in terms of animality and evolutionary discourses in Grandville’s text. Drawing on Alexandra Wettlaufer’s analysis of the dialectic between word and image at play in Scenes des animaux, as well as Bakhtinian polyphony and Eve Sedgwick’s concept of erotic triangles, I consider the work in terms of a triple dialectic between word, image, and gender. Through the figures of bird and bee and their associated verbal tropes, Grandville, Hetzel, and Balzac all link women to consumerism, materialism, stupidity, and sensuality. This set of associations distance women from the field of “legitimate” literary production and disempowers them as sociopolitical agents. At the same time, the overdetermined containment strategies employed by the contributors reveal that they rely on women as their primary reading public and clientele. Economic anxiety has been displaced onto the body of the animal-woman, and the contributors dress up their objections with the accoutrements of conservative morality. In titling this project “The Birds and the Bees” —a euphemism used to explain sex and courtship to small children— I call attention to the persistence of animal metaphors related to gender and sexuality in contemporary culture.Comparative Literatur

A One-In-A-Billion Chance : The Transformative Effect of Stan Lee and Spider-Man on American Popular Culture

The body of research from scholarly sources on the history of comic books contends that Stan Lee’s original run of The Amazing Spider-Man influenced American culture in a generic sense, but little has been written on the specific ways the comic influenced popular culture. This paper details four specific ways that Stan Lee’s Spider-Man influenced American popular culture during the tumultuous decade of the 1960’s. The comic redefined the modern American hero by making a flawed character, with a tenuous grasp on the moral high ground, the protagonist. It also affirmed the newly established teenage identity in American society by depicting a teenager as a full-fledged superhero, not a sidekick. Stan Lee’s Spider-Man also pioneered the use of the comic book medium as a platform to discuss contentious national issues during the 1960’s, including civil rights, drug abuse, and the Vietnam War. Finally, the title undermined censorship in the comic book industry by daring to defy the Comics Code Authority’s prohibition on depictions of drug use. Through these four groundbreaking efforts Stan Lee and Spider-Man earned their place in the pantheon of American popular culture icons and shaped the course of American culture for decades to come

Truth After cinema: The explosion of facts in the documentary films of Jia Zhangke

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2013 Intellect Books.This article identifies and elaborates on two models of resistance evident in JiaZhangke’s film corpus. The deployment of different cinematic strategies produces an experimental calling into question of the value of truth and of truth as value. In the films here analysed Jia moves from resistance through organic observation to a model of resistance structured around a series of fabulations. If the first regime addresses the truth of ideology, then the target of the second is the ideology of truth. It is in this passage that Jia enters political cinema, collapsing the distinction between factual and fictional and opening up a space that belongs to no collectivity

Hardy and God: Tess of the D\u27Urberville\u27s Role as the Ultimate Pawn

Thomas Hardy\u27s Tess of the D \u27Urbervilles has multiple competing claims which are difficult to reconcile within the schools ofhist0l1cal, feminist, or classical criticism. A better way to approach the novel is to look at Tess as a pawn within Hardy\u27s own struggle with God. Hardy constructs God as the author of the multiple systems which lead to Tess\u27 final doom: a flawed genetic line, a flawed sexual double standard, and a flawed system of justice. Tess, in Hardy\u27s mind, becomes the victim of a God who is akin to the deity of Greek playwright Aeschylus\u27 Prometheus Bound, rather than the merciful and loving Christian God. This victimization justifies Hardy\u27s assertion that Tess is a pure woman even though society holds her responsible for multiple sins

Nietzsche's Critique of Truth

Nietzsche has made many paradoxical remarks about truth, including the claim that truth does not exist. Philosophers have attempted to tease out various theories of truth from his scattered remarks. This piece argues that Nietzsche had no interest in a theory of truth, rather he is interested in the rhetoric of truth; how claims of truth are used to coerce agreement and conformity, to hide expressions of subjective wills behind alleged objective facts. This kind of analysis is predicated on understanding Nietzsche’s various prima facie conflicting pronouncements by finding their intended audience. Nietzsche is not interested in finding eternal truths, rather his pragmatic concern is to move various audiences from their complacent beliefs. What is needed to move one target audience might be the opposite of what is needed at another time to move another targeted audience. Nietzsche is aiming at local interventions rather than global philosophical truths. This suggests a general model for Nietzsche interpretation: To understand a given Nietzsche text, first try to find who his intended audience/ audiences is/are and from what beliefs is he trying to pry them, and in what direction he seeks to move them. The general thought behind this piece is that Nietzsche should be regarded more as a psychologist or Kulturkritker than as a philosopher in the modern sense (one who is interested in questions of ultimate ontology, epistemology, etc.). I also suggest in this piece that careful attention be paid to Nietzsche language, in particular his use of the metaphoric of degeneration. To this end I analyze his use of martial and forensic metaphors. Footnote 14 touches on the highly important and vexing question of his responsibility for his subsequent use arguing that Nietzsche's culpability lays not so much in his particular claims but in his very language.Article (Reprinted in "Oxford Readings in Philosophy: Nietzsche", edited by B. Leiter and J. Richardson, Oxford University Press, 200

Neutral Partisan Lawyering and International Human Rights Violators

This Essay considers the applicability of a particular model of legal ethics, neutral partisanship, to American lawyers’ representation of those who violate, or are accused of violating, international human rights. I maintain that neutral partisanship, a deficient model for American lawyers in their domestic practice, is even more problematic when applied in the international arena. The central question is this: are there limits, short of engaging in illegal conduct, that should constrain lawyers in the representation of those who violate international human rights? Neutral partisanship holds that any lawyer may, or, more strongly, must, pursue any legal end for any client by any legal means. I disagree, both in general and with respect to international human rights practice in particular