In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 689 Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?: Domestic Violence in The Shining At first glance, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining seems to be a straightforward Gothic horror film. It starts with the Torrance family— Jack, Wendy, and Danny—moving from their Boulder, Colorado, apartment into the Overlook Hotel, where Jack (Jack Nicholson) has (...) accepted a job as the winter caretaker. By the film’s climax, an axe-wielding Jack says to his terrified wife and son (Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd), through the door to the bathroom where they are hiding, “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in. Not by the hair on your chinny chin chin? Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!”1 Jack assumes the role of the Big Bad Wolf, the nightmarish, predatory beast of fairy tales. These lines, along with Nicholson’s exaggerated performance as a crazed killer, parody the Gothic horror genre and slasher films and even children ’s fairy tales in what is, at its core, a story about domestic violence. In both Kubrick’s film and Stephen King’s 1977 novel, from which the film was adapted, the Gothic genre becomes a vehicle for a serious tale about violence within the family. The “discovery” of child abuse in the 1960s, “the creation of the wife-beating problem” in the 1970s, and 1. The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1980; Warner Home Video, 2007), DVD. The line is from the fairytale of The Three Little Pigs. Geoffrey Cocks discusses the sources and ramifications of the fairytale in The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2004), 33–38. 690 Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck the feminist movement allowed viewers to perceive domestic violence with a new level of understanding.2 It is my contention that The Shining comments on domestic violence in a way that has been mostly overlooked by critics. While most analyses of both the novel and the film have come from literary and cinema studies perspectives, I offer a sociological approach focused on the profound effect of changing social mores on cultural production. I draw also on feminist and queer theorizing of audience identification, gender, and erotic pleasure in horror films to explain the significant contributions made by King, Kubrick, Duvall, and screenwriter Diane Johnson to the film’s intervention in US public discourse about domestic violence.3 The first scholar who argued that Kubrick’s film is essentially a domestic abuse narrative was James Hala, who based his analysis on a close reading of critical reviews of the film and a discussion of the performances, with no reference to its social, political, or historical context.4 But it is important to note that both the novel and the film came at the end of a decade when the recognition of domestic violence as a social problem was still relatively new. Sociologists and the medical and legal professions did not take “wife beating” seriously until the mid-1970s, when the women’s movement brought public attention to spousal abuse.5 2. Kathleen J. Tierney, “The Battered Women Movement and the Creation of the Wife Beating Problem,” Social Problems 29, no. 3 (1982): 207–20; Stephen J. Pfohl, “The ‘Discovery’ of Child Abuse,” Social Problems 24, no. 3 (1977): 310–23. 3. The theoretical works that I have drawn on most heavily are Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and David Greven, Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema: The Woman’s Film, Film Noir, and Modern Horror (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 4. James Hala, “Kubrick’s The Shining: The Specters and the Critics,” in The Shining Reader, ed. Anthony Magistrale (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990), 203–16. 5. In 1976, a national survey reported that “at least 1.8 million American women are severely beaten in their own homes every year.” Murray A. Straus, et al., Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family, as cited in “‘The Burning Bed’: TV... (shrink)

"In this groundbreaking book Jean Walton subjects psychoanalysis to a sustained and highly illuminating ethnographic critique.

In this book, philosopher Jean W. Rioux extends accounts of the Aristotelian philosophy of mathematics to what Thomas Aquinas was able to import from Aristotle’s notions of pure and applied mathematics, accompanied by his own original contributions to them. Rioux sets these accounts side-by-side modern and contemporary ones, comparing their strengths and weaknesses.

La célébration du 70e anniversaire de la mort de Freud est l'occasion d'une réflexion sur sa théorie de la guerre et de la mort. Fondée sur le mythe de la horde primitive, le meurtre du père et la dette commune, la société, selon Freud, s'organise autour des interdits de meurtre et d'inceste. La guerre fondée dans la pulsion de mort est la conséquence de la levée collective de ces interdits. Freud bâtit ainsi ce que l'on pourrait nommer une " culture (...) du meurtre ". Mais dès la Première Guerre mondiale, il avait saisi qu'un bouleversement était en train de s'opérer avec la guerre totale, industrielle et informationnelle. Tout en restant fondamentalement et radicalement enraciné dans la pensée freudienne, ce travail tente de démontrer un "au-delà " de Freud dans l'apparition d'une " culture de l'extermination " qui trouve son origine dans les grands textes fondateurs des monothéismes, puis son champ de réalisation dans l'histoire occidentale principalement. Cette " culture de l'extermination " n'a pas disparu avec les horreurs du siècle dernier. Elle est toujours bien présente partout dans le monde et prête à ressurgir en Occident comme le laissent entrevoir quelques frémissements politiques dans de nombreux pays. Il faut donc demeurer lucide et vigilant. (shrink)

Comment Bachelard, fils d'un cordonnier, professeur de physique et chimie, a-t-il pu devenir cet humaniste aussi savant que philosophe, aussi penseur que poète? Il n'a pas emprunté les chemins balisés, ceux des élites universitaires et culturelles. Il a contrarié les pronostics et les conventions. Il s'est adjugé contre vents et marées le droit de penser par lui-même en bousculant les frontières des savoirs et de la culture et en dérangeant les us et coutumes établis. "Un ouvrage aussi lumineux que la (...) destinée et l'oeuvre de Gaston Bachelard. Au plus près de sa vie et de sa pensée". (Philippe Meirieu). (shrink)

Bathos - remarque -- Pt. 1. Le champ de bataille -- Pt. 2. Kant et ses juges -- Pt. 3. Traité de bathologie.

1. De Dieu -- 2. L'être au féminin -- 3. L'alliance.

Jean Anouilh , Antigone, La Table ronde, ISBN - 9782710300250Seamus Heaney, The Burial at Thebes: a version of Sophocles' Antigone, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN - 9780374117214.

The importance of hate radio pervades commentary on the Rwandan genocide, and Rwanda has become a paradigmatic case of media sparking extreme violence. However, there exists little social scientific analysis of radio's impact on the onset of genocide and the mobilization of genocide participants. Through an analysis of exposure, timing, and content as well as interviews with perpetrators, the article refutes the conventional wisdom that broadcasts from the notorious radio station RTLM were a primary determinant of genocide. Instead, the article (...) finds evidence of conditional media e fects, which take on significance only when situated in a broader context of violence. (shrink)

"An English translation of Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime, originally written in Latin in the sixteenth-century by Jean Bodin.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 123-126 [Access article in PDF] Beyond the Usual Alternatives? Buddhist and Christian Approaches to Other Religions Virginia Straus Boston Research Center for the 21st Century In regard to the three commonly accepted attitudes toward other religions—exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist—Terry C. Muck presents an extremely persuasive critique of the existing paradigm. He objects to the ideological stereotyping "The Paradigm" promotes. He proposes that we make (...) a shift in the use of The Paradigm: Instead of labeling people and their points of view, it would identify modes of thinking about certain beliefs and practices, without negative connotations. He calls this a shift to an instrumental or functional use of The Paradigm. His cost/benefit analysis of this shift attributes to the benefit side of the ledger the following advantages: less name-calling, more engagement with the substantive ideas being presented, new openings for dialogue among Christians formerly separated from each other by negative use of The Paradigm, and possible resonance with the logic of non-Western traditions.As I read these ideas I recalled a recent paper written by Miriam Levering, who, with no knowledge of Muck's novel and irreverent approach to The Paradigm, wrote about Buddhist thinking, answering Muck's question about whether his idea resonates with non-Western traditions. Levering presents a fascinating description and analysis of the position taken by certain Chinese Buddhist teachers and two contemporary Buddhist leaders, Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama. She says Buddhists, when making judgments about religions, tend to divide them into three parts: teachings, practices, and realization. In regard to teachings, she says Buddhists use discernment to evaluate other teachings. As Levering describes the use of discernment, she cites three modes of thinking that resonate rather well with Muck's instrumental approach. She says Buddhists distinguish among three kinds of teachings:Teachings that are wrong, unskillful, and do not lead to liberation (that is, they take an exclusivist position on a particular doctrine);Teachings that, while partial or shallow, can lead people to make progress on the path to liberation (an inclusivist position); andFully liberative teachings (a pluralist position). [End Page 123]In regard to practices, Levering indicates that the Buddhists she has studied do not apply discernment to practices. They all appear to take a pluralist position at all times on all practices, whether old, new, or yet to be invented. Although she does not say so, I am sure she would agree that this is not true of all Buddhist traditions. Pure Land, Nichiren Buddhists, and others have specific practices to which they are exclusively committed. In Levering's discussion of the third dimension of religions—the one she terms "realization"—she finds the Buddhist view to be primarily inclusivist rather than pluralist.With this in mind, I would like to raise two questions that may provide a helpful starting point for discussion. First, how does the recent scholarship aimed at developing a fourth alternative relate to this paper?Muck, with his justifiably jaundiced view of the use to which The Paradigm has been put, shares the dissatisfaction with the existing paradigm that has motivated this recent scholarly work. Yet he claims to be "skeptical that simply expanding The Paradigm by adding new forms would really get us anywhere." I wonder if he is not too quick to write off this promising work. In fact, I think this scholarship would help those searching for a fourth way (Levering included) and further refine the reflections they make on the pluralist position and also would suggest a fourth alternative mode of thinking to be used in the instrumental way Muck suggests.Specifically, I am thinking of James Fredericks's work on what he calls comparative theology, which he considers a process or practice rather than a theory. In essence, he, like Muck, is shifting to an instrumental use. By emphasizing the comparative approach, Fredericks hopes to understand a religion 1 on its own terms without glossing over differences as in the pluralist approach. Another thinker on this subject, James Wiggins, would substitute the term... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Grand Theory on Trial:Kafka, Derrida, and the Will to PowerNina Pelikan StrausIn summa: so that man may respect himself he must be capable of doing evil.(Nietzsche, The Will to Power)1IThe following pages offer evidence that in The Trial Kafka invents characters who deploy a Nietzschean-sourced language of deconstruction related to what we now call theory; that in "Before the Law" Kafka's priest deconstructs The Law to which K. is (...) subjected, and that Kafka exposes the discursive devices by which laws can be deconstructed. Kafka's text then opens the way to another kind of deconstruction of that-which-is-already-deconstructed as performed by Jacques Derrida in his 1987 essay, "Before the Law."2 Although this claim may seem self-evident or rhetorically circular to some readers of Kafka and his commentators, it is the result of years of puzzlement concerning the impact of Grand Theory in American criticism.This puzzlement, often accompanied by antagonism, is shared by critics whose essays comprise Patia's and Corral's Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. The 2005 volume includes major reassessments of poststructuralist theory, notably Derrida's, by Tzetan Todorov, Thomas Nagel, M. H. Abrams, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Frederick Crews, René Welleck, David Bromwich, and others. While the deconstructionist idea of the arbitrariness of the signifier appears to be a central target of these critics' analysis, it is precisely the arbitrariness of the signifier called the Law that Kafka explores in The Trial.Kafka's intended relation to what he exposes has been much debated. [End Page 378] Stanley Corngold refers to the "undecidability" of Kafka's work and its "narrative mood of neutrality."3 The emphasis on "undecidability" in Kafka can be viewed as symptomatic of the influence of French Theory embraced by the American literary academy in the 1970s and 1980s. This latter view of Kafka's writing contrasts sharply with an earlier view, such as Hannah Arendt's, that The Trial, for all its ambiguity and multivalence, carries precise political meanings and warnings that Kafka fully intended. The deconstructionist moment did not bury convictions such as Adorno's or Canetti's that "from the beginning, Kafka sided with the humiliated,"4 or that for "a generation of early readers Joseph K.'s arrest was... a prophetic anticipation of the fate awaiting Hitler's victims."5 But deconstruction's skeptical effect undermined the certitude that Kafka was a politically important novelist. For its detractors, the deconstructionist view that there is "nothing outside of the text" ignores that texts like Kafka's have shaped human lives and human history. Wellek, who helped to introduce French theory to American literature departments, now asserts that theory has destroyed literary studies, while Frederick Crews argues that "Derrida's judgment that 'there is nothing outside the text' automatically precludes recourse to evidence." In Crews's view, "both Derrida and his myriad followers think nothing of appropriating and denaturing propositions from systems of thought whose premises they have already rejected." Thomas Nagel goes further in condemning "post-modern relativism" as a "quick fix" which puts reason to sleep. In Theory's Empire, Derrida's language is described as a "maze," a "prison house of language," a "limbo of combined attention and nonassertion."6The arguments against deconstruction theory can scarcely be summarized here, but a sampling of the commentaries in Theory's Empire on Derrida can lead us through and eventually back to what is or isn't at political stake in reading The Trial. Two questions are of concern: How much of Kafka's political acumen does Derrida ignore or misread in his commentary on "Before the Law"? And: to what degree do Derrida's rhetorical devices and ingenious language games resemble the language of the Courtiers who torture Joseph K.? What might such an analogy imply? Other questions follow, such as David Bromwich's very important ones. "About the status of Derrida's procedures there was always a puzzle," he writes. "Was deconstruction a technique proper to the commentator, and necessary as a tactic against the naïve constructionism of the author? Or was it something the author's writing practiced for itself, in... (shrink)

A goal of living as well as possible is central to practice and research with young adults living with home mechanical ventilation (HMV). Significant effort has been put into conceptualizing and measuring the quality of life (QOL) as a proxy for living well. Yet, dominant understandings of QOL have been influenced by normative, ableist, and biomedical discourses about what constitutes a good life that, when applied in practice and systems with those living with HMV, can contribute to exclusion and constrain (...) opportunities to live well. Inquiry into what certain understandings of living well can do is critical to opening up possibilities to reimagine living well with HMV. This paper draws on findings from a critical narrative inquiry that explored the experiences of five young adults (ages 18–40 years) living with HMV. Data were co‐constructed virtually through an initial interview and photo‐elicitation using participant‐generated photographs. A critical narrative analysis of participants' stories made visible the ideological effects of ableist, biomedical, and individualist discourses and how the young adults reproduced and resisted these dominant discourses. Their stories further opened up possibilities for nurses and other healthcare providers to see living well and QOL differently. (shrink)

The occurrence of hiccoughs (hiccups) is very widespread and yet their neuronal origin and physiological significance are still unresolved. Several hypotheses have been proposed. Here we consider a phylogenetic perspective, starting from the concept that the ventilatory central pattern generator of lower vertebrates provides the base upon which central pattern generators of higher vertebrates develop. Hiccoughs are characterized by glottal closure during inspiration and by early development in relation to lung ventilation. They are inhibited when the concentration of inhaled CO2 (...) is increased and they can be abolished by the drug baclofen (an agonist of the GABAB receptor). These properties are shared by ventilatory motor patterns of lower vertebrates, leading to the hypothesis that hiccough is the expression of archaic motor patterns and particularly the motor pattern of gill ventilation in bimodal breathers such as most frogs. A circuit that can generate hiccoughs may persist in mammals because it has permitted the development of pattern generators for other useful functions of the pharynx and chest wall muscles, such as suckling or eupneic breathing. BioEssays 25:182–188, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This interview with Joseph Frank — best known as the author of a five-volume biography of Dostoevsky (published 1976 – 2002) and of Spatial Form in Modern Literature (1945) — was conducted in 2012 at Stanford and is published here, shortly after his death at age ninety-four, as a memorial to him. The conversation highlights Frank's representation of Dostoevsky as a critic and a satirist of the nihilist intelligentsia of nineteenth-century Russia — a portrayal that runs counter to the understanding (...) and use of his writings and his characters by Marxists, Nietzscheans, Freudians, Surrealists, crisis theologians, and Existentialists. Frank tells the story of how his friendship in the 1950s with Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, led to Frank's teaching himself Russian in order to read Notes from Underground and write an article on the novella that changed the face of Dostoevsky scholarship. The conversation also provides hints as to how — as director of the Christian Gauss Seminars at Princeton and as a contributor to debates about Spatial Form in Critical Inquiry — he negotiated the intellectual trends and distractions of Grand Theory, which came to dominate literary criticism in the 1970s and confirmed Frank in his counterfocus on the importance of historical context, not only in criticism but also in literary creation. Above all, the interview shows how a scholar can overcome institutional pressures and the temptations of careerism by shrugging them off and concentrating attention on scholarship alone. (shrink)

L'omniprésence des images dans la société mass-médiatique est corrélative de leur évanescence et du constant renouvellement qui conditionne le processus de leur consommation. Leur omnipotence se réduit ainsi à celle de stimuli destinés à induire des comportements. Or, il convient d'autant plus de revenir d'une telle exténuation de l'image que cette dernière constitue l'une des dimensions essentielles du déploiement de la vie humaine. L'image est traditionnellement rapportée à l'activité imaginante d'un sujet. Mais, s'il est vrai que l'étoffe des hommes et (...) des choses qui se donnent à voir dans le paraître sensible d'une image n'existe pas coupée d'un tel paraître, l'esthétique relève aussi de l'ontologie et sa tâche est de nous ré-apprendre à contempler les images. Au regard de la clarté et de la distinction conférées par la théorie à notre appréhension des choses, la détermination positive des images ne tient-elle pas en effet au fait que c'est dans leur dimension qu'il nous est donné de faire l'expérience vive du paraître de ces choses, jusqu'à l'extrême de l'horreur, du merveilleux et du sacré? (shrink)

La " théorie du tout " désigne cette loi hypothétique qui résumerait en un seul principe toute la diversité de l'Univers. Cet essai a pour objectif de montrer que l'Amour, envisagé comme principe d'accord, est le seul principe raisonnablement envisageable pour tenir ce rôle. L'argumentation s'appuie sur l'histoire des sciences et des techniques comme sur l'évolution de l'Univers telle que nous la percevons aujourd'hui.

Passer la religion à " l'étamine " de la psychanalyse permettra de mieux comprendre pourquoi nous succombons aux fascinations du religieux : fascination pour le père grandiose dont on attend qu'il restaure le narcissisme perdu ; fascination pour le sacrifice salvateur aux dieux obscurs en vue de tenter de payer une dette inconsciente insolvable ; fascination pour la question du sens de l'exister en réponse à l'énigme du vide que l'homme rencontre face à lui-même et à l'univers ; fascination, enfin, (...) pour le discours du maître qui se donne comme seul capable de combler le vide ou le rien. (shrink)