Books on the topic 'White male character'

In 1956, the Mexican American modern dance choreographer José Limón presented The Emperor Jones, an all-male dance based on the 1920 Eugene O’Neill play. Limón’s Emperor loosely follows the plot of O’Neill’s play, which famously tells the story of an African American Pullman porter who makes himself emperor of a “West Indies” island. To portray O’Neill’s characters, Limón put himself and his all-male cast in black body paint. Limón’s painted body is examined as three bodies: a brown Mexican body; a white “American” body (with the privilege to represent the Other); and the black body of the Brutus Jones character. Focusing on Limón’s homosocial casting, performance techniques, and engagement with minstrelsy, this article shows how Limón’s freedom to dance as a brown, black, and white body did not reveal the decline of raced and gendered borders, but rather their resilient presence as part of the field on which his dances were produced.

This chapter interprets the serialized narration and characterization of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925) in line with the figuring of female bodies through the photographic apparatus of advertisement and celebrity that was ancillary to popular Broadway entertainments in the early twentieth century. Unpacking the image of Ellen Thatcher, Dos Passos’s central character, as a photograph at the end of the multilinear novel, it accounts for Dos Passos’s critique of the patriarchal, white-centric specular economy of the modern city. The photographic freezing of the wealthy, white Ellen registers her imprisonment to the male gaze and her resistance to those who are ethnically and socially other to her. Yet by the additive construction of its female characters, Manhattan Transfer undercuts Ellen’s sense of her essentialized difference from the novel’s other women.

This chapter demonstrates how American workers created and maintained a dense masculine culture at the workplace. Though a variety of masculine cultures existed, age, ethnicity, and race determined their construction. Most important, the dominant culture was white and male. Workers constructed and reconstructed their public postures of manhood in their relations with each other, with their employers, and with women. At the workplace, the male culture of aggression flourished; fighting, cursing, drinking, and all manner of manly misbehavior prevailed. Numerous union grievances captured the dense male culture that revealed the details of the male character of the shop floor, and many such grievances often typified workers' manly quest for dignity and worth.

Narrative approaches initiated a sea-change in Judges studies. Narrative approaches, however, require additional tools if they are to challenge the text’s ideology. While several narrative critics combined their expertise with feminist theory, scholars are yet to engage fully with the critical study of masculinities or with queer studies that offer a new, rich vein of research focused on how gender and sexuality is an integral aspect of character. YHWH has largely evaded the kind of attention given to other, more earthly, characters. This chapter discusses YHWH’s alpha-male qualities and how they create gender trouble for the cast of male characters in Judges; how YHWH is caught up with the cultural dictates of honor and shame; how object-relations theory can be fruitful in understanding the relationship dynamics between YHWH and Israel. Attention finally returns to the narrator and his stake in this representation of the deity.

While Lord Kitchener was lauded at home for his self-sacrificial qualities, in the field he implemented scorched-earth policies and pioneered the use of concentration camps. Writers including Rudyard Kipling exposed the cruel practices on which the British Army depended in the course of the Boer Wars (1899–1902), critiquing the military leadership. A space then opened in fictional narrative for the representation of a new type of protagonist—the rebel, the self-reliant adventurer or irregular who could make personal sacrifices through individual ethical choice rather than as a consequence of military expediency: in response, the regular Army sought to maintain a monopoly on the representation of heroism (occasionally scapegoating irregulars). Arguably, this period sees the high watermark of the popularity of tropes of military sacrifice in the nineteenth century, but also points towards later changes, where large armies face guerrilla bands fighting in their own homelands.

Chapter 3 offers a brief but speculative suggestion for how Aristotle might think lawgivers can identify future citizens with good natural character traits in practice, by turning to physiognomic passages in Aristotle. I argue that while the Prior Analytics discusses only the logical and ontological conditions that would make a science of physiognomy possible, thus leaving it in the middle whether Aristotle actually thinks such a science is possible or is one he practices himself, his treatment of physiognomic signs in the History of Animals as basic facts about the faces of animals provides evidence for Aristotle’s own use and endorsement of physiognomy in a biological context. There was a widespread practice among physicians and philosophers of Aristotle’s time to appeal to physiognomy for diagnostic purposes, and it is at least possible that Aristotle did too.

Sooner or later, our words take on meanings other than we intended. How Words Make Things Happen suggests that the conventional idea of persuasive rhetoric (which assumes a speaker’s control of calculated effects) and the modern idea of literary autonomy (which assumes that “poetry makes nothing happen”) together have produced a misleading account of the relations between words and human action. Words do make things happen. But they cannot be counted on to produce the result they intend. The argument is enriched by examples from speakers and writers of various sorts, with close readings of the quoted passages. Chapter 1 considers the theory of speech acts propounded by J. L. Austin. “Speakers Who Convince Themselves” is the subject of Chapter 2, which interprets two soliloquies by Shakespeare’s characters, two by Milton’s Satan, and a character’s inward meditation in a novel by Henry James. The oratory of Burke and Lincoln comes in for extended treatment in Chapter 3, while Chapter 4 looks at the rival tendencies of moral suasion and aestheticism in the poetry of Yeats and Auden. The final chapter, a cause of controversy when first published in the London Review of Books, supports a policy of unrestricted free speech against contemporary proposals of censorship. Since we cannot know what our own words are going to do, we have no standing to justify the banishment of one set of words in favour of another.

This chapter explores representations of blackness in opera in relation to masculinity and morality. More specifically, it considers the changing codes of masculinity in leading male roles and how they are calibrated differently for white European characters and nonwhite characters with non-European ancestry. It also looks at the ways in which masculinity and heroism are brought together differently for black and non-black characters. In order to elucidate these issues, the chapter analyzes Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887), focusing on its references to getting the “chocolate” ready and the way Verdi dramatizes Otello's vicious murder of Desdemona. Four other operas written in the first half of the twentieth century, two of which feature white European title characters and the other two feature African American protagonists, are examined: Alban Berg's Wozzeck (1925), Ernst Krenek's Jonny spielt auf (1927), George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935), and Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes (1945).

This chapter examines how entertainment television addressed color-blind equality through an analysis of NBC's Julia, considered the most significant entertainment show of the civil rights years. Created by writer-director Hal Kanter and starring Diahann Carroll, Julia presented viewers with whites only as supporting characters. However, the image Julia provided could only clash uncomfortably with dominant news imagery of exploding ghettos, Black Panthers and other non-nonviolent militants, as well as the generalized chaos and upheaval characterizing the period. This chapter argues that Julia was a fictional vision of the “black and white together” utopia promised in the networks' March on Washington coverage. It also considers how black and white audiences as well as mainstream press critics all made sense of the show in notably different and, at times, contradictory ways. Finally, it discusses the concerns of black viewers and some white critics about Julia, including its depiction of the black family.

The history of the Christian Bible’s reception in South Africa was part of a package that included among others, the importation of European patriarchy, land grabbing and its impoverishment of Africans and challenged masculinities of African men. The preceding factors, together with the history of the marginalization of African women in bible and theology, and how the Bible was and continues to be used in our HIV and AIDS contexts, have only made the proverbial limping animal to climb a mountain. Wa re o e bona a e hlotša, wa e nametša thaba (while limping, you still let it climb a mountain) simply means that a certain situation is being aggravated (by an external factor). In this chapter the preceding Northern Sotho proverb is used as a hermeneutical lens to present an HIV and AIDS gender sensitive re-reading of the Vashti character in the Hebrew Bible within the South African context.

Situating its analysis of The Merchant of Venice within recent critical discussions over Shakespeare’s place within a wider early modern dramatic culture, this chapter reads the play as a response to Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. It focuses on how Marlowe’s great merchant, Barabas, is split by Shakespeare into two characters, Shylock and Antonio, who make money in different ways. By linking commercial ventures to romance notions of adventure, it argues, The Merchant of Venice manages to valorize Antonio’s business model while demonizing Shylock’s. Finally, the chapter asks whether the ‘romancing’ of Mediterranean commerce is something undertaken by the play itself, or by its Venetian characters.

Why do resource-constrained countries make costly commitments to universal health coverage and AIDS treatment after transitioning to democracy? At a time when the world’s wealthiest nations struggle to make healthcare and medicine available to everyone, this book explores the dynamics that made landmark policies possible in Thailand and Brazil but which have led to prolonged struggle and contestation in South Africa. While conventional wisdom suggests that democratization empowers the masses, this book draws attention to an underappreciated dynamic: that democratization empowers elites from esteemed professions – frequently doctors and lawyers – who forge progressive change on behalf of those in need in the face of broader opposition at home and from abroad. The relative success of professional movements in Thailand and Brazil and failure in South Africa highlights critical differences in the character of political competition. Whereas fierce political competition provided opportunities for professional movements to have surprising influence on the policymaking process in Thailand and Brazil, the unrivaled dominance of the African National Congress allowed the ruling party the luxury of entertaining only limited healthcare reform and charlatan AIDS policy in South Africa. The book offers lessons for the United States and other countries seeking to embark on expansive health reforms.

This chapter presents an interview that took place at Terence Davies's home in Mistley, Essex, on October 16, 2012. Topics discussed include the influence of T. S. Eliot's The Four Quartets; whether Davies has finally found his own language after years of making movies; the reasons why he continues to make movies despite his belief that cinema is a potentially a dying form and the fact that he no longer enjoys watching movies; the reasons why some of films are in black-and-white; his views about his alter ego character Robert Tucker in the Trilogy; his views on realism; and the importance of telling a narrative in a nonstraightforward way.

This chapter considers U.S. Supreme Court decisions that guaranteed defendants' rights and their role in shaping the structure of rape trials at the local level during the 1960s. New judicial protections worked in favor of defendants yet simultaneously made trials even more difficult for victims, as legal requirements necessitated more precise corroborative testimony that overshadowed the narratives women produced. While they continued to demand the right to be heard when they reported sexual attacks, changes in trials during this period made women's narratives less central to successful prosecutions. Their personal lives and characters were thus less vitally safeguarded against exposure and courtroom attacks.

Across both virtue and vice cases, spontaneity has the potential to give rise to actions that seem “unowned.” Agents may lack self-awareness, control, and reasons-responsiveness in paradigmatic cases. But these are actions nevertheless, in the sense that they are not mere happenings. While agents may be passive in an important sense when acting spontaneously, they are not thereby necessarily victims of forces acting upon them (from either “outside” or “inside” their own bodies and minds). The central claim of this chapter is that spontaneous actions can be, in central cases, “attributable” to agents, by which I mean that they reflect upon the character of those agents. This claim is made on the basis of a care-based theory of attributability. Attributability licenses (in principle) what some theorists call “aretaic” appraisals. These are evaluations of an action in light of an agent’s character or morally significant traits.

The character of European states—their approaches to governance, the extent to which they penetrate and shape their societies—has changed radically over centuries. Today, European states continue to vary from one another across many fundamental dimensions. Some are nation states, other states are openly multinational. Some are unitary, others federal. Some command strong bureaucratic capacities, others struggle to collect taxes and keep roads paved. Some states operate impartial and effective systems of justice, while in others judicial systems are riven with corruption or hobbled by inefficiency. Some states intervene heavily in the economy, while others do so minimally. This chapter provides an overview of the contributions that historical institutionalist scholarship has made to our understanding of the origins, evolution and impact of the state in Europe.

In much of modern fiction, it is the clothes that make the character. Garments embody personal and national histories. They convey wealth, status, aspiration, and morality (or a lack thereof). They suggest where characters have been and where they might be headed, as well as whether or not they are aware of their fate. This study explores the agency of fashion in modern literature. Celia Marshik’s study combines close readings of modernist and middlebrow works, a history of Britain in the early twentieth century, and the insights of thing theory. She focuses on four distinct categories of modern clothing: the evening gown, the mackintosh, the fancy dress costume, and secondhand attire. In their use of these clothes, we see authors negotiate shifting gender roles, weigh the value of individuality during national conflict, work through mortality, and depict changing class structures. Marshik’s dynamic comparisons put Ulysses in conversation with Rebecca, Punch cartoons, articles in Vogue, and letters from consumers, illuminating opinions about specific garments and a widespread anxiety that people were no more than what they wore. Throughout her readings, Marshik emphasizes the persistent animation of clothing—and objectification of individuals—in early-twentieth-century literature and society. She argues that while artists and intellectuals celebrated the ability of modern individuals to remake themselves, a range of literary works and popular publications points to a lingering anxiety about how political, social, and economic conditions continued to constrain the individual.

This chapter presents a commentary on Hal Hartley's film career. It begins with a biographical sketch based on material included in interviews, reviews, and essays about Hartley's work, and an earlier version of his official website, possiblefilms.com. It then moves on to analyze seven feature films: The Unbelievable Truth (1989), Trust (1990), Simple Men (1992), Amateur (1994), Henry Fool, Fay Grim (2006), and The Book of Life (1998). These films show that efficiency, estrangement, and antirealism allow Hartley to chart the struggles of individuals against the ideological precepts that pertain to public and private behavior, responsible actions, “common sense,” and the cinematic conventions that support such ideologies. (e.g., romantic characters who will live “happily ever after”).These conflicts are often related to the restrictions posed by gender norms and are depicted as conflicts with authority figures. Hartley's male protagonists struggle to live up to popular ideals of heteronormative masculinity, control, and violent mastery of the world around them, while his central female characters break from heteronormative conceptions of women as mothers, caregivers, and/or sexual objects.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when the idea of religion as a private matter connected to the home and the female sphere won acceptance among the bourgeois elite, Christian religious practices began to be associated with femininity and soft values. Contemporary critics claimed that religion was incompatible with true manhood, and today's scholars talk about a feminisation of religion. But was this really the case? What expression did male religious faith take at a time when Christianity was losing its status as the foundation of society? This is the starting point for the research presented in Christian Masculinity.Here we meet Catholic and Protestant men struggling with and for their Christian faith as priests, missionaries, and laymen, as well as ideas and reflections on Christian masculinity in media, fiction, and correspondence of various kinds. Some men engaged in social and missionary work, or strove to harness the masculine combative spirit to Christian ends, while others were eager to show the male character of Christian virtues. This book not only illustrates the importance of religion for the understanding of gender construction, but also the need to take into consideration confessional and institutional aspects of religious identity.

The unresolved territorial conflicts and outbreaks of violence that have characterized the history of Israel make it distinctive among welfare states in affluent democracies. The war which accompanied the founding of the state in 1948 was quickly followed by the creation of a dedicated system of veterans’ benefits. Both the demand and supply of military-related benefits has been repeatedly refuelled by ongoing conflict and war preparation. These benefits have grown in both generosity and coverage, while at the same time having a crowding-out effect on parallel civilian programmes. This chapter documents the resulting dualistic character of social rights in Israel, and explains the institutional, political, and cultural dynamics that have driven the evolution of military-related benefits.

As taught by Viola Spolin, Keith Johnstone, and others, improv is a mode of playing that depends on group consensus, through such concepts as “agreement” and “groupmind,” as a basis for the release of individual creativity and the freedom to bypass both internal and external censorship. Improv comedy on stage, however, most often reflects the white, male, heterosexual perspective of its dominant players. This article explores the “spontaneous” performances of gender and race in improv comedy in light of power dynamics that often silence difference and encourage shallow stereotypes. Using Judith Butler’s theories and other approaches, the chapter then discusses improv’s potential for deconstructing gender performance. Detailed analysis of the work of the all-female improv troupe, JANE, reveals the wealth and variety of characters that can be improvised when choices of gesture, voice, and body language are playfully recombined across conventions of gender and sexuality.

At the beginning of World War 2, Pamela, Neil, and her mother Amy moved to Laleham, a village on the Thames. Shortly thereafter, Neil joined the Army and was posted to India; and on New Year’s Day 1941 Pamela gave birth to her son Andrew Morven. While coping with rationing, the sound of bombers overhead, and the red sky of London in the Blitz, she continued to write. Her novel Winter Quarters deals with the temporary settlement of an artillery battalion in a quiet English village and is notable for her deft handling of male characters. In 1941 she reviewed enthusiastically the first of C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers novels and they began exchanging letters and to meet for lunch in London. In May 1944 Pamela gave birth to her daughter Lindsay Jean.

This chapter focuses on Noël Coward’s 1930 comedy Private Lives to illustrate how queer modernist performance might pass as light entertainment in the theatrical mainstream. Written shortly after Coward read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Private Lives engages with classical and early twentieth-century ideas about androgyny and in doing so subverts interlinked sexual and aesthetic norms. The play’s main characters, Amanda and Elyot, are ambiguously gendered, yet together form a heterosexual couple that recalls the separated halves of the lost androgyne or third sex of Aristophanes’s myth of love in Plato’s Symposium. This queering of heterosexuality through androgynous male and female “other halves” combines with the play’s emphasis on fleeting moments of present happiness to derail comedy’s traditional movement toward marriage, reproduction, and social continuity, anticipating more recent queer resistance to what Lee Edelman has called “reproductive futurism.” While achieving enduring popular success, Private Lives thus queered comic form and fostered queer spectatorship.

Studies of popular culture show that contemporary images of science have become far less negative and much more complex than earlier stereotypical depictions. Scientists are now more likely to be characterized as heroes rather than villains, and modern scientist characters exhibit a moral complexity not found in previous portrayals. But the historic depiction of scientists as white, privileged American males has not changed. Scholarly analyses demonstrate a shift away from fictional interpretations of scientific knowledge as inherently dangerous toward a representation of science as being threatening only when it is unregulated and freed from ethical constraints. Recent entertainment media renders science more accessible by demystifying the scientific process even if these texts still portray science as a domain for elites. Past representations of science as a secretive and mysterious practice have also been replaced by a new public image of science as a practice that has an almost preternatural certainty.

What are ideas for Spinoza? Through a discussion of the definition of “idea” in 2def3, it is shown, first, that Spinoza is reacting here to both Hobbes’ objections to the Meditations and Descartes’ replies. While he agrees with Hobbes that ideas are conceptions that are formed, rather than merely perceived, by the human mind, he sides with Descartes regarding the irreducibly mental character of ideas. With respect to the issue of mental content, the chapter next argues that Spinoza not only distinguishes between formal and objective reality but also assumes that objective reality comprises two aspects, representational content and epistemic value. This is one reason why Spinozistic ideas have proved notoriously difficult to clearly individuate. Lastly, through an examination of how Spinoza employs Descartes’ Pegasus example, the case is made that, far from simply elaborating on Descartes’ approach, Spinoza dismisses Cartesian nativism as a basis for his rationalism.

This chapter considers whether self-deception informs Kant’s notoriously controversial claim that there is an evil rooted universally throughout the human species. It is ultimately argued that while self-deception as described in Chapters 3 and 4 cannot be implicated in his argument, a nearby kind of practical-epistemic failing, namely dissemblance or dissimulation (Verstellen), can be. To help secure this conclusion, the chapter also addresses several important interpretive challenges including: whether Kant intends his claims about a universal evil to be a priori or empirically grounded; whether the social (or unsocial) aspects of human life are relevant to Kant’s proof; if Kant can justifiably describe the evil that runs throughout human nature as both a propensity or willingness and a chosen disposition; how the universality of evil can exist alongside the possibility of individual moral reform; and what to make of the claim that evil attaches to the human race’s “species” character.

The introduction cites numerous critical responses to Michael Haneke that wrongly assume his emotional coldness and misanthropic outlook. Though his films are notorious for subjecting us to harsh experiences of violence, this book establishes a moral forerunner to Haneke: Bertolt Brecht. Like Brecht, Haneke allows for the audience’s emotional reactions, while also prompting their active engagement with a view to progressive change. More particularly, he defamiliarizes conventional uses of film sound to engage our hearts and imaginations, much as Brecht disrupted mainstream theatrical forms of representation. Haneke’s films also include numerous moments of absent sound, which are as potent as Mother Courage’s famously silent scream. This introduction stresses the importance of understanding how and why the director uses sound tracks to make us hear the social worlds his characters inhabit, and by extension our own world, better.

This book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. While the majority of Law and Literature studies characterise the law as a force of coercion and subjugation, this book instead treats in greater depth the law’s own vulnerability, both to corruption and to correction. The dominance of law in early modern life made its failings and improvements of widespread concern: it was a regular and popular focus of criticism. The terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike evaluated form and character. Legal reform, together with the conflicts and anxieties that inspired and sprang from it, were represented by courtly, coterie, and professional writers. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the Gray’s Inn Christmas revels of 1594-5, Donne’s ‘Satyre V’, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale all examine the potential, as well as the ethical and practical limitations, of legal reform’s contribution to local and national governance.

Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World, edited by Anita Tarr and Donna White, is a collection of twelve essays analyzing young adult science fiction and fantasy in terms of how representative contemporary YA books’ authors describe and their characters portray elements of posthumanist attitudes. The authors give a brief survey of theorists’ discussions of how posthumanism rejects—but does not entirely forsake—liberal humanist tenets. Primarily, posthumanism calls for embracing the Other, eliminating binaries that separate human and nonhuman, human and nature, organic and inorganic, stressing the process of always-becoming. Due to technological enhancements, we should recognize that our species is changing, as it always has, becoming more networked and communal, fluid and changeable. Posthumanism does not mandate cyborgs, cloning, genetic enhancement, animal-human hybrids, mutations, advanced prosthetics, and superhuman strengths—although all of these are discussed in the collected essays. Posthumanism generally upholds liberal humanist values of compassion, fairness, and ethical responsibility, but dismantles the core of anthropocentrism: the notion that humans are superior and dominant over all other species and have the right to control, exploit, destroy, or marginalize those who are not the ideal white, able-bodied male. The more we discover about humans, the more we question our exceptionality; that is, since we co-evolved with many other organisms, especially bacteria, there is no DNA genome that is uniquely human; since we share many traits with animals, there is no single trait that defines us as human or as not human (such as using tools, speaking language, having a soul, expressing emotions, being totally organic, having a sense of wonder). The twelve essayists do not propose that YA fiction should offer guidelines for negotiating posthumanist subjectivity—being fragmented and multiple, networked vulnerable—though many of the novels analyzed actually do this. Other novelists bring their adolescent characters to the brink, but do not allow them to move beyond the familiar structures of society, even if they are rebelling against those very structures. Indeed, adolescence and posthumanism share many elements, especially anxieties about future possibilities, embracing new ideas and new selves, and being in a liminal state of in-between-ness that does not resolve itself. In other words, young adult fiction is the ideal venue to explore how we are now or we might in the future maintain our humanity in a posthuman world.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy is a collection of fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world, bringing together some of the best-known writers in the field with a strong selection of younger Shakespeareans. Together these essays offer readers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor. The collection is organized in five sections. The opening section places the plays in a variety of illuminating contexts, exploring questions of genre, and examining ways in which later generations of critics have shaped our idea of ‘Shakespearean’ tragedy. The second section is devoted to current textual issues; while the third offers new critical readings of each of the tragedies. This is set beside a group of essays that deal with performance history, with screen productions, and with versions devised for the operatic stage, as well as with twentieth and twenty-first century re-workings of Shakespearean tragedy. The book’s final section seeks to expand readers’ awareness of Shakespeare’s global reach, tracing histories of criticism and performance across the world. Offering the richest and most diverse collection of approaches to Shakespearean tragedy currently available, the Handbook will be an indispensable resource for students, both undergraduate and graduate levels, while the lively and provocative character of its essays will make it a required reading for teachers of Shakespeare everywhere.

Haneke’s films are sonically charged experiences of disturbance, desperation, grief, and many forms of violence. They are unsoftened by music, punctuated by accosting noises, shaped by painful silences, and defined by aggressive dialogue. Haneke is among the most celebrated of living auteurs: he is two-time receipt of the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival (for The White Ribbon [2009] and Amour [2012]), and Academy Award winner of Best Foreign Language Film (for Amour), among numerous other awards. The radical confrontationality of his cinema makes him a most controversial, as well as revered, subject. Hearing Haneke is the first book-length study of the sound tracks that define his living legacy as an aural auteur. Hearing Haneke provides close sonic analyses of The Seventh Continent, Funny Games Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Caché, The White Ribbon, and Amour. The book includes several sustained theoretical approaches to film sound: including postcolonialism, feminism, genre studies, psychoanalysis, adaptation studies, and auteur theory. From these various theoretical angles, Hearing Haneke shows that the director consistently uses all aural elements (sound effects, dialogue, silences, and music) to inspire our humane understanding. He expresses faith in us to hear the pain of his characters’ worlds most actively, and hence our own more clearly. This has profound social and personal significance: for if we can hear everything better, this entails a new awareness of the “noise” we make in the world at large. Hearing Haneke will resonate for anyone interested in the power of art to inspire progressive change.

While the critical and popular attention afforded to twenty-first century young adult literature has exponentially increased in recent years, the texts selected for discussion in both classrooms and scholarship has remained static and small. Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Hate U Give dominate conversations among scholars and critics—but they are far from the only texts in need of analysis. Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction offers a necessary remedy to this limited perspective by bringing together a series of essays about the many subgenres, themes, and character types that have been overlooked and under-discussed until now. The collection tackles a diverse range of subjects—modern updates to the marriage plot; fairy tale retellings in dystopian settings; stories of extrajudicial police killings and racial justice—but is united by a commitment to exploring the large-scale generic and theoretical structures at work in each set of texts. As a collection, Beyond the Blockbusters is an exciting glimpse of a field that continues to grow and change even as it explodes with popularity, and would make an excellent addition to the library of any scholar, instructor, or reader of young adult literature.

What reason has an educated man for going to the theatre, except to see Menander? Thus the judgement of Aristophanes of Byzantium, and in later antiquity the social comedies of Menander ranked second in popularity only to the epics of Homer. Yet for centuries thereafter the plays were thought to be irretrievably lost, failing to become part of the canon of writers that generations of copyists deemed worthy of transmitting to us. It was only in the 20th century that large sections of the plays began to emerge from Egypt, enabling modern readers to gauge for themselves the correctness of earlier verdicts. Following on from the author's edition of Menander's Bad-Tempered Man (dyskolos), the present volume aims to provide readers with ready access to the playwright's consummate sophistication in dramatic technique through two, albeit incomplete, plays, The Shield (aspis) and Arbitration (epitrepontes). The Greek text is accompanied by a translation aimed at providing a version that is readable, while at the same time remaining close enough to the original to make comparison of the two a feasible proposition. The commentary, in turn, concentrates upon dramatic development, providing the reader with pointers to appreciating the playwright's often subtle techniques of both dramatic development and character portrayal.

Africa was falling apart. But now it is coming together, and Africa and Africans are achieving greatness. The twenty-first century is significant for every African. In Things Come Together, Robert Rotberg extols the successes and explains the struggles. Rotberg is one of the world’s foremost authorities on African politics and society, and in this book he synthesizes his knowledge of the continent into a concise overview of the current state of Africa and where it is headed. To that end, Rotberg considers Africa’s myriad peoples as contributors in their separate nations to the continent’s ultimate destiny.The continent is experiencing explosive population growth and rapidly urbanizing. How are African states managing this epochal shift? He looks at how Africa’s nations are governed, ranging from states with autocratic kleptocrats to democratized regimes that have made progress in achieving economic growth and battling corruption. He then turns to African economies, looking at growth levels, productivity, and persistent corruption. He concludes by covering the effects of war, health care, wildlife management, varieties of religious belief, education, technology diffusion, and the character of both city and village life in this ever-evolving region. Throughout this sweeping work, Rotberg deftly moves readers across the continent, from Nigeria to South Africa, from Kenya to Uganda, to name but a few. While there are cross-continent commonalities related to governance, demographics, and economic performance, he shows the unique national variations of who and what is African.

Ancient literature is full of people, gods, and animals in impressive motion. But while the importance of space has been realized recently, motion has had little attention, for all its prominence in literature, and its interest to ancient philosophy. Motion is bound up with decisions, emotions, character; its specific features are expressive. The book starts with motion in visual art: this leads to the characteristics of literary depiction. Literary works discussed are: Homer’s Iliad; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Tacitus’ Annals; Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus; Parmenides’ On Nature; Seneca’s Natural Questions. The two narrative poems here diverge rewardingly, as do philosophical poetry and prose; in the prose narrative, as in the philosophical poem, the absence of motion, and metaphorical motion, are important; the dramas scrutinize motion verbally and visually. Each discussion pursues the general roles of motion in a work, with detail on its language of motion; then passages are analysed closely, to show how much emerges when this aspect is scrutinized. A conclusion brings works and passages together. It considers the differences made by genre and by the time of writing. Among aspects of motion which emerge as important are speed, scale, shape of movement, motion and fixity, movement of one person and a group, motion willed and imposed, motion in images and unrealized possibilities. A companion website makes it easier to see passages and analyses together; it offers videos of readings to convey the vitality and subtlety with which motion is portrayed.

‘Oh, my God! to think of that kind-hearted, lovely young woman, who brings happiness with her wherever she goes, bringing terror to me! Terror when her pitying eyes look at me; terror when her kind voice speaks to me; terror when her tender hand touches mine!’ Porthgenna Tower on the remote western Cornish coast. Moments before her death, Mrs Treverton dictates a secret to her maid, never to be passed to her husband as she had instructed. Fifteen years later, when Mrs Treverton’s daughter, Rosamond, returns to Porthgenna with her blind husband, Leonard, she is intrigued by the strange and seemingly disturbed Mrs Jazeph’s warning not to enter the Myrtle Room in the ruined north wing. Strong-minded and ingenious, Rosamond’s determined detective work uncovers shocking and unsettling truths beyond all expectation. A mystery of unrelenting suspense and psychologically penetrating characters, The Dead Secret explores the relationship between a fallen woman, her illegitimate daughter, and buried secrets in a superb blend of romance and Gothic drama. Wilkie Collins’s fifth novel, The Dead Secret anticipates the themes of his next novel, The Woman in White in its treatment of mental illness, disguise and deception, and the dispossession of lost identity. Yet a series of comic figures offsets the tension, from the dyspeptic Mr Phippen to the perpetually smiling governess, Miss Sturch. Displaying the talent and energy which made Collins the most popular novelist of the 1860s, The Dead Secret represents a crucial phase in Collins’s rise as a mystery writer, and was his first full-length novel written specifically for serialization.

Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability’s medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and the body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl’s 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies shows the mutability of the Victorians’ understanding of the human body’s centrality to identity—an understanding made mutable by changes in science, technology, religion, and class. It also demonstrates how that understanding changed along with developing narrative styles: as disability became increasingly medicalized and the soul increasingly psychologized, the mode of looking at deviant bodies shifted from gaping at spectacle to scrutinizing specimen, and the shape of narratives evolved from lengthy multiple-plot novels to slim case studies. Moreover, the book illustrates that, despite this overall linear movement from spectacle to specimen in literature and culture, individual texts consistently reveal ambivalence about categorizing the body, positioning some bodies as abnormally deviant while also denying the reality or stability of normalcy. Bodies in Victorian fiction never remain stable entities, in spite of narrative drives and the social, medical, or scientific discourses that attempted to control and understand them.

This book develops a philosophical appreciation of the spiritual life. Specifically, it aims to show how a certain conception of spiritual good, one that is rooted in Thomas Aquinas’s account of infused moral virtue, can generate a distinctive vision of human life and the possibilities for spiritual fulfilment. Among other matters, the text examines the character of the goods to which spiritual traditions are directed; the structure of such traditions, including the connection between their practical and creedal commitments; the relationship between the various vocabularies that are used to describe, from the insider’s perspective, progress in the spiritual life; the significance of tradition as an epistemic category; and the question of what it takes for a spiritual tradition to be handed on from one person to another. So, while the discussion aims to make some contribution to the discipline that we standardly call the philosophy of religion, it has a rather different focus from some familiar ventures in the field, in so far as it starts from a consideration of the nature of spiritual goods and of traditions that seek to cultivate such goods. In his account of the virtues, Aquinas suggests how it is possible for our relations to the everyday world to be folded into our relations to the divine or sacred reality otherwise understood. In this sense, he is offering a vision of how it is possible to live between heaven and earth. This book considers how that vision may be extended across the central domains of human thought and experience, and how it can deepen and diversify our understanding of what it is for a human life to be lived well.

TOWARDS THE NEW LIFE Theology and Importance of Christian Initiation for the Life of Faith The book is in equal parts a presentation and an invitation. The subject matter of both is the mystagogical initiation leading to the personal encounter with God and eventually to the union within the Church in Christ, which happens initially and particualry in the sacramental liturgy. Mystagogy was the essential experience of life in the early Church and now is being so intensely discussed and postulated by the ecclesial Magisterium and through the teaching of the recent popes and synods. Within the ten chapters of this book the reader proceeds through the aspects strictly associated with Christian initiation, noticeable in catechumenate and suggestive for further Christian life. It is not surprising then, that the study begins with answering the question about the sense of dealing with catechumenate at all. The response developed in the first chapter covers four key points: the contemporary state of our faith, the need for dialogue in evangelization, the importance of liturgy in the renewal of faith and the obvious requirement of follo- wing the Church’s Magisterium, quite explicit in the subject undertaken within this book. The introductory chapter is meant to evoke interest in catechumenate as such and encourage comprehension of its essence, in order to keep it in mind while planning contemporary evangelization. For doing this with success and avoiding pastoral archeology, we need a competent insight into the main message and goal of Christian initiation. Catechumenate is the first and most venerable model of formation and growth in faith and therefore worth knowing. The second chapter tries to cope with the reasons and ways of the present return to the sources of catechumenate with respect to Christian initiation understood to be the building of the relationship with God. The example of catechumenate helps us to discover, how to learn wisely from the history. This would definitely mean to keep the structure and liturgy of catechumenate as a vehicle of God’s message, which must be interpreted and adapted always anew and with careful and intelligent consideration of the historical flavour on particular stages within the history of salvation and cultural conditions of the recipients. For that reason we refer to the Biblical resources and to the historical examples of catechumenate including its flourishing and declining periods, after which we are slowly approaching the present reinterpretation of the catechumenal process enhanced by the official teaching of the Church. As the result of the latter, particularly owing to the Vatican Council II, we are now dealing with the renewed liturgy of baptism displayed in two liturgical books: The Rite of Baptism for Children and the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). This version for adults is the subjectmatter of the whole chapter, in which a reader can find theological analyses of the particular rites as well as numerous indications for improving one’s life with Christ in the Church. You can find interesting associations among the rites of initiation themselves and astounding coherence between those rites and the sacraments of the Eucharist, penance and other sacraments, which simply means the ordinary life of faith. Deep and convincing theology of the process of initiation proves the inspiring spiritual power of the initial and constitutive sacraments of baptism and confirmation, which may seem attractive not only for catechumens but also for the faithful baptized in their infancy, and even more, since they might have not yet had a chance to see what a plausible treasure they have been conveying in their baptismal personality. How much challenge for further and constant realization in life may offer these introductory events of Christian initiation, yet not sufficiently appreciated by those who have already been baptized and confirmed! We all should submit to permanent re-evangelization according to this primary pattern, which always remains essential and fundamental. Very typical and very post-conciliar approach to Christian formation appears in the communal dimension, which guards and guarantees the ecclesial profile of initiation and prepares a person to be a living member of the Church. The sixth chapter of the book is dealing with ecclesial issues in liturgy. They refer to comprehending the word of God, especially in the context of liturgy, which brings about a peculiar theological sense to it and giving a special character to proclaiming the Gospel, which the Pope Francis calls “liturgical proclamation”. The ecclesial premises influence the responsibility for the fact of accompanying the candidates, who aim at becoming Christ’s disciples. As the Church is teaching also in the theological and pastoral introduction to the RCIA, this is the duty of all Christians, which means: priests, religious and the lay, because the Church is one organism in whose womb the new members are conceived and raised. As this fact is strongly claimed by the Church the method of initiation arises to great importance. The seventh chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the catechumenal method stemming from Christ’s pedagogy and His mystery of Incarnation introducing a very important issue of implementing the Divine into the human. The chapter concerning this method opens a more practical part of the book. The crucial message of it is to make mystagogy a natural and obvious method which is the way of building bonds with Christ in the community of the people who already have these bonds and who are eager to tighten them and are aware of the beauty and necessity of closeness with Christ. Christian initiation is the process of entering the Kingdom of God and meeting Christ up to the union with Him – not so much learning dogmas and moral requirements. This is a special time when candidates-catechumens-elected mature in love and in their attitude to Christ and people, which results in prayer and new way of life. As in the past catechumenate nowadays inspires the faithful in their imagination of love and mercy as well as reminds us about various important details of the paschal way of life, which constitute our baptismal vocation, but may be forgotten and now with the help of catechumenate can be recognized anew, while accompanying adults on their catechumenal way. The book is meant for those who are already involved in catechumenal process and are responsible for the rites and formation as well as for those who are interested in what the Church is offering to all who consciously decide to know and follow Christ. You can learn from this book, what is the nature and specificity of the method suggested by the Rite itself for guiding people to God the Saviour and to the community of His people. The aim of the study is to present the universal way of evangelization, which was suggested and revealed by God in His pedagogy, particularly through Jesus Christ and smoothly adopted by the early Church. This way, which can be called a method, is so complete, substantial and clear that it deserves rediscovery, description and promotion, which has already started in the Church’s teaching by making direct references to such categories as: initiation, catechumenate, liturgical formation, the rereading the Mystery of Christ, the living participation in the Mystery and faith nourished by the Mystery. The most engaging point with Christian initiation is the fact, that this seems to be the most effective way of reviving the parish, taking place on the solid and safe ground of liturgy with the most convincing and objective fact that is our baptism and our new identity born in baptismal regenerating bath. On the grounds of our personal relationship with God and our Christian vocation we can become active apostles of Christ. Evangelization begins with ourselves and in our hearts. Thinking about the Church’s mission, we should have in mind our personal mission within the Church and we should refer to it’s roots – first to our immersion into Christ’s death and resurrection and to the anointment with the Holy Spirit. In this Spirit we have all been sent to follow Christ wherever He goes, not necessarily where we would like to direct our steps, but He would. Let us cling to Him and follow Him! Together with the constantly transforming and growing Church! Towards the new life!