1,664 research outputs found

    Whose Needs Does Service Serve? Complicating the Citizen Soldier Narrative

    Get PDF
    The growth of conscript militaries was integral to the creation of civil rights in European nation-states, which established militaries as a key site of claims-making. However, the United States military has diverged from these models, and most cases of inclusion or integration of social groups are not directly connected with claims-making. What has influenced the U.S. military’s responsiveness to pressures, both internal and external, and how has this changed over time? I employ a comparative historical approach to three cases—African-Americans, women, and non-heterosexuals—to unpack the U.S. military as a state institution and a site of claims-making. By incorporating elements unique to American institutions into existing models of militaries, I find that the U.S. military has become increasingly vulnerable to domestic political, international political, internal economic, and internal and external cultural pressures since the World War period. Despite its enormous economic and physical strength, the U.S. military is more responsive now than ever before to internal and external demands

    Octave Mirbeau et les clivages du moi

    Get PDF
    Mirbeau's inner world, with its hidden treasures, its disorder, its constructive incoherence, creates a literature in its own image, violent, disparate and generous. His entire work is part of his contemporary Viennese master's one. Subconscious deliberate mistakes, sublimations, perversions, original scenes, neuroses... Everything leads the reader to integrate the biographical element into the very act of creation. The regressive attitude of his earlier novels which translates into a desire for fusion with Nature turns in the 1890s into a will of self-construction eventually opening onto a confident vitality and an enthusiastic belief in modernity. But this decadent literature, no more than a naturalistic one, should not be reduced to a psychoanalytic analysis. Should they exist, these elements are subjected to a literary transmutation which urges the reader to conceive his own personal myth rather than sense a neurotic divide. Torn between an intellectual demand and a spiritual expectation, it seems nonetheless that Nature, the element of inspiration for the author, lets us feel a prospective deep division

    Rachilde et ses «Mercuriales»

    Get PDF
    The emblem of decadence, Rachilde's literature is regarded as obscure, meant for the "happy few" who are fond of a modernity which is now outdated. In a field where languidness and the wild lyricism of imagination predominate, the criticisms written by the novel columnist are remarkable for their strength and the efficiency of their approach. For more than thirty years, in the columns of Mercure de France, she used her talent as a reader, applying herself to protecting the review's favourite novelists, praising some novel for their authenticity while denouncing the bad quality of others pieces of work. Her production, which covered a large number of novels, stood out. However, her work is not free of errors. Besides the names that she wants to promote, the article examines the liberties she allows herself to take with literary criticism, however codified this genre might be: recurrence of themes, outline of a poetical approach of the novel, quest for action, longing for a moral dimension, reinstatement of a function of the novel as entertainment. All these elements reveal how she manages to avoid the constraint of the critical exercise, putting her own mark on a practice which is traditionally distant from pure creation. Thus, criticism can function as a laboratory for the art of writing

    Brain Stew

    Get PDF
    corecore