Designing a Mixed Public and Private System for the Health Insurance Market

Reviews features of a reform proposal offering both public and private plans in a government-run purchasing pool, modeled on Medicare, in the commercial insurance market. Analyzes potential issues, including standardization of benefits and risk selection

Ohio impromptu, genre and Beckett on film

Samuel Beckett’s choice of the title Ohio Impromptu to name the play first performed to an audience of academics and scholars at Columbus Ohio in 1981 is one manifestation of its author’s interest in the question of literary genre; more generally, in Beckett’s dramatic works one encounters a meticulous attention to the activity of categorisation, even if the energy is often directed toward the creation of phantom genres for spectral exemplars. This essay concerns itself with Ohio Impromptu in particular because by means of elements specific to this play (including the context in which it was first performed) it comments upon its own very failure to occupy its designated genre co-ordinates (these include its identity both as a play and as an ‘impromptu’). This play, which is so apt to incorporate other genres, however, is presided over by a stage direction which locates it firmly in the theatrical context. It is in its deliberate failure to attend to this stage direction that the Beckett on Film version of the play goes beyond the mere treacherous fidelity that is inevitably a feature of any adaptation. In arguing this, the essay analyses the foregrounding in the play of questions that can be said to pertain to genre (in several senses). Its more specific intention is to suggest that, via a combination of casting and special effects, the adaptation succeeds not only in cancelling the critical reflection on the ‘genre gesture’ that is lodged in Ohio Impromptu, but also in eradicating the very disjunction between Reader and Listener upon which the play depends

Dispelling the Myths About the Battered Woman\u27s Defense: Towards a New Understanding

This essay explores the growth of the use of self-defense by battered women from a historical perspective in order to explain the magnitude of the prejudices these defendants face. The essay suggests that a redefinition of Battered Woman\u27s Syndrome will ease much of the criticism from feminists and eliminate the confusion in the legal profession surrounding the use of self-defense by battered women. The essay also pushes for a redefinition of the concept of imminence to encompass the realities of a battered woman\u27s life

The movement-image, the time-image and the paradoxes of literary and other modernisms

Which modernism or modernisms circulate in Deleuze’s two-volume work on cinema? Can one meaningfully claim that both or either The Movement-Image (Cinema I) and The Time-Image (Cinema II) maintain connections with literary modernism? What relationship if any may be forged between theoretical debates in the areas of literary and film studies as these have been influenced by engagement with Deleuze’s work on cinema? The first obstacle to any successful negotiation of these questions lies in the absence in the books of any reference to the category of modernism – a fact which is after all hardly surprising in a French author of Deleuze’s generation. A second consideration is summed up well by Joost Raessens when he argues that “For Deleuze the term ‘modernity’ is not a neutral category. In effect modern cinema is a representation of differential thought which is determined [...] as a fundamental critique of the classic thought of Plato and Hegel.” Scholars often assert that Deleuze’s modernity owes much to Nietzsche, in the shape of the latter’s demand for a new approach to questions of truth and knowledge. Once life is no longer judged in the name of a higher authority such as the good or the true, the stage is set for Nietzschean transvaluation. This is a process which subjects “every being, every action and passion, even every value, in relation to the life which they involve” (TI 141) to evaluation. This normative model of a cinema which has the capacity to carry out a Nietzschean total critique by means other than philosophy presides over The Time-Image in particular. In terms of the trajectory of Deleuze’s thought, total critique is opposed, in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, to Kantian critique as well as to Hegelian sublation. The thinking images of modern cinema, more specifically of its preeminent auteurs in Deleuze’s pantheon such as Welles, Resnais, Godard, and others, can effectuate this new image of thought. Thus is rendered tangible Deleuze’s claim that films think, that cinema thinks. Thus are linked a modernism of cinema and a project which dates back to Difference and Repetition, namely the challenge to a certain image of thought. In this challenge the allies include the two philosophers who dominate the film books – Bergson and Nietzsche. This chapter assumes the position that it is impossible to consider Deleuze’s modernism as being in any way other than intrinsically linked to his overall philosophical system and therefore that it is only in this context that connections with literary modernism can be explored

The proxemics of 'Neither'

This chapter takes as its point of departure the frequent injunction in Beckett’s late prose works to build or construct an environment for a character to inhabit. It is proposed that this instruction is central to the textual operations of the late prose. Making use of the work of Philippe Hamon on text and architecture, and through a close reading of Beckett’s short prose piece (originally written as a libretto for Morton Feldman), it is argued that, despite its sparse nature, ‘Neither’ can, in large part, still be read as exemplifying Hamon’s insights into the operations of the textual and the architectural as these were manifest in the classic realist novel. The specific challenges which Beckett’s late prose present, however, require a supplementary critical vocabulary in order to account for the manner in which the textual and the architectural interpenetrate and expose each other in the twentieth century

Beckettian pain, in the flesh: singularity, community and 'the work'

This essay argues that the representation of pain in Beckett’s writing exposes the paradox in his work concerning the relationship of the individual suffering subject and the community. Making reference to studies of pain and literature generally and to salient studies of Beckett, the essay shows how the narration of pain in Beckett’s prose works in particular is closely linked to its more general interrogation of subject-object relations. As the preeminent agent, source as well as repository of pain, writing in Beckett itself comes to occupy, in a transpositional manner, the poles of subject, object and work. If ‘pain’ names the subject-object continuum (and thus a community of subject and object), that very conjunction exposes the co-habitants to their own mutual espacement – qua subject and object. The common feeling (of pain, of pains at each of the poles) is countermanded in advance by separation. The conjunction gives rise to a sapping, devastating and agonising attempt to conjure an image (of and as the object), an image which holds out the possibility of the felicity, or at least palliation, offered by community (and the work). The image is, however, both a wounding regime (which impedes utterance) and a generative regime (in that the thwarting of utterance restores the compulsion to continue to attempt to conjure the image through writing). The two components, pain and community, are illustrated with specific reference to Texts for Nothing, through an analysis of which a new conjuncture of the themes of pain, community and the role of the work of art is proposed

Rabelais - his educational theories

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit