Performing Relevance/ Relevant Performances: Shakespeare, Jonson, Hitchcock

Engages with questions of historicism and presentism in the modern performance of early modern drama, and compares Ben Jonson with Alfred Hitchcock

The Implications of New Historicism for Evangelical Bible Interpretation: An Evaluation

The twentieth century has seen a rise in recognizing the Bible not only as historical or theological work but also as a piece of literature, and the natural progression of this idea is to apply the same methods used for literary texts to the biblical text. However, many movements in literary studies seem antithetical to evangelical ideas of interpretation, as the goal of evangelical interpretation is always to find God’s intended meaning for the text. This thesis will explore the features of one literary theory, New Historicism, as presented in Practicing New Historicism, and ask if this theory can be made compatible with evangelical presuppositions, or even offer any unique insights for biblical interpretation

Structuralist Legal Histories

This is a contribution to a symposium titled Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought. The central theme of the piece is the relation between legal structuralism and legal historiography

The style of the present: Karel Teige on constructivism and poetism

In this essay the Czech avant-gardist Karel Teige's dual program of Constructivism/Poetism is interrogated in the context of his own claim that architectural historicism was degraded by the rupture into a duality of structure and ornament. This inability to escape the terms of his own critique is shown to be the result of Teige's articulation of avant-garde culture as the embodiment of the historical identity or style of the present. (c) 2005 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved

History, Literature, and Authority in International Law

One consequence of international law’s recent historical turn has been to sharpen methodological contrasts between intellectual history and international law. Scholars including Antony Anghie, Anne Orford, Rose Parfitt, and Martti Koskenniemi have taken on board historians’ interest in contingency and context but pointedly relaxed historians’ traditional stricture against presentist instrumentalism. This essay argues that such a move disrupts a longstanding division of labor between history and international law and ultimately brings international legal method closer to literature and literary scholarship. The essay therefore details several more or less endemic ways in which literature and literary studies confront challenges of presentism, anachronism, meaning, and time. Using examples from writers as diverse as Anghie, Spinoza, Geoffrey Hill, Emily St. John Mandel, China Miéville, John Hollander, Pascale Casanova, Matthew Nicholson, John Selden, Shakespeare, and Dante, it proposes a “trilateral” discussion among historians, international lawyers, and literary scholars that takes seriously the multipolar disciplinary field in which each of these disciplines makes and sustains relations with each of the others.

Capitini, Aldo

A brief presentation of life, activity and publications of an Italian philosopher, the founder with Guido Calogero of the Liberal-Socialist movement under the Fascist regime and the theorist of non-violence and omnicracy as the key ideas for a new left, beyond reformism and third-International state-socialis