The worldwide environmental crisis has also influenced the field of literary studies. Posthumanism and ecocriticism is a new way of reading in which the anthropocentric approach…
Abstract
The worldwide environmental crisis has also influenced the field of literary studies. Posthumanism and ecocriticism is a new way of reading in which the anthropocentric approach and the binary oppositions such as human/non-human, wild/tame and natural/cultural are overcome. Posthumanism pays attention to all sorts of non-human life, animals, for sure, but aliens and robots are included too, while ecocriticism is concerned with the role and function of nature in literary texts. The chapter offers an ecocritical approach of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) and Friday (Tournier). Rereading these novels we see that nature, or the elements, make up an ‘actant’ equal to the human characters and a special interest is created in the mutual conflicts which arise between nature and the human characters.
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 1719) is considered by many as an appropriate book to allow pupils to escape from or be shielded from the negative influence of civilization. Like Robinson on his island pupils should learn from experience. Defoe’s work was so popular it inspired a whole series of imitations called ‘Robinsonnades’ and many of them were edited specifically for children. But is Robinson Crusoe a valuable book from an ecological point of view? How does Robinson relate to nature? Does the novel focus on nature or rather on the human hero seeking to control and tame the environment?
In 1967, the French author Michel Tournier reworked the Crusoe myth in Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Friday or the Pacific Rim), followed by a parallel text for children Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (Friday or the Wild Life, 1971). In both novels Robinson’s black servant, Friday, initiates his colonial master into alternative ways of living, dismantling civilization and restoring nature. That same deconstruction of the idea of Western superiority fits well with the postcolonial philosophy that attacks the logic of domination and its hierarchical dichotomy: white above coloured.
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A “sentence,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a pronouncement of opinion, a pithy statement, an authoritative decision, or an idea expressed in a grammatically…
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A “sentence,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a pronouncement of opinion, a pithy statement, an authoritative decision, or an idea expressed in a grammatically complete, self-contained utterance. Notice that these definitions all emphasize thought rather than action. Of course, sentences – such as “Let there be light,” “Keep off the grass,” “You shall be hanged by the neck until dead,” and “Notice that these definitions all emphasize thought rather than action” – may command or recommend an act. Some philosophers even maintain that “certain classes of utterances, in certain situations…bring about, rather than refer to, a new state of fact” (Hollander, 1996, p. 178). J. L. Austin, whose book How to Do Things with Words established the field of speech-act theory, argues that “performative” statements can have the effect of actions (1962).1 And yet the words in a sentence – whether it is an ordinary linguistic unit or the judgment in a criminal case – are still distinguishable from the deed they describe. The differences between pronouncing and executing sentences even led Justice Antonin Scalia to assert, in Wilson v. Seiter, that restrictions against “cruel and unusual punishment” should apply only to pain “formally meted out as punishment by the statute or the sentencing judge,” or meant to be cruel and unusual by the inflicting officer (1991, p. 2325). He is assuming, of course, a legal system that “guarantees – or is supposed to – a relatively faithful adherence to the word of the judge in the deeds carried out against the prisoner” (Cover, 1992, p. 225).2 As Scalia’s remarks demonstrate, however, the distinction between a sentence’s pronouncement, on the one hand, and its execution, on the other, raises disturbing questions about intention, interpretation, agency, and responsibility.
Revisits works considered as foundational to management theory and practice. Argues that Taylor, Fayol and Follett work to legitimize management as a body of knowledge, as a…
Abstract
Revisits works considered as foundational to management theory and practice. Argues that Taylor, Fayol and Follett work to legitimize management as a body of knowledge, as a practice, and as a profession ‐ and further, as a utopian resolution of conflicts between workers and managers. Methodology is based on techniques of textual analysis and thus also discusses the contribution of such approaches to management history and the relationship of this analysis of Taylor, Fayol and Follett to contemporary themes in management theory and practice.
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Both researchers and policy makers have increasingly focused their energies in exploring the sources of economic growth. The purpose of this paper is to explore the very first…
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Purpose
Both researchers and policy makers have increasingly focused their energies in exploring the sources of economic growth. The purpose of this paper is to explore the very first ideas on the sources of economic growth of Kautilya during the fourth century BCE.
Design/methodology/approach
Kautilya's non‐technical statements on economic growth are presented as a formal model of economic growth.
Findings
Kautilya believed that institutions are a prerequisite to economic growth and good governance, knowledge, ethical conduct and economic growth are interdependent. That is, Kautilya believed in the virtuous cycle of economic growth.
Research limitations/implications
Kautilya's model of virtuous cycle implies that Kaufmann and Kraay specify an incorrect model to test the virtuous cycle model of economic growth.
Practical implications
Although it is a challenge to empirically estimate Kautilya's model if estimated appropriately, it could help in partitioning the Solow residuals into contributions made by technical progress and good governance towards economic growth.
Originality/value
The paper amounts to rewriting the history of economic thought.
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Paul Paolucci, Micah Holland and Shannon Williams
Machiavelli's dictums in The Prince (1977) instigated the modern discourse on power. Arguing that “there's such a difference between the way we really live and the way we ought to…
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Machiavelli's dictums in The Prince (1977) instigated the modern discourse on power. Arguing that “there's such a difference between the way we really live and the way we ought to live that the man who neglects the real to study the ideal will learn to accomplish his ruin, not his salvation” (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 44), his approach is a realist one. In this text, Machiavelli (1977, p. 3) endeavors to “discuss the rule of princes” and to “lay down principles for them.” Taking his lead, Foucault (1978, p. 97) argued that “if it is true that Machiavelli was among the few…who conceived the power of the Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and decipher mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships.” He believed that we should “investigate…how mechanisms of power have been able to function…how these mechanisms…have begun to become economically advantageous and politically useful…in a given context for specific reasons,” and, therefore, “we should…base our analysis of power on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination” (Foucault, 1980, pp. 100–102). Conceptualizing such techniques and tactics as the “art of governance”, Foucault (1991), examined power as strategies geared toward managing civic populations through shaping people's dispositions and behaviors.
To determine where, when, how, and wherefore European social theory hit upon the formula of “the True, the Good, and the Beautiful,” and how its structural position as a skeleton…
Abstract
Purpose
To determine where, when, how, and wherefore European social theory hit upon the formula of “the True, the Good, and the Beautiful,” and how its structural position as a skeleton for the theory of action has changed.
Methodology/approach
Genealogy, library research, and unusually good fortune were used to trace back the origin of what was to become a ubiquitous phrase, and to reconstruct the debates that made deploying the term seem important to writers.
Findings
The triad, although sometimes used accidentally in the renaissance, assumed a key structural place with a rise of Neo-Platonism in the eighteenth century associated with a new interest in providing a serious analysis of taste. It was a focus on taste that allowed the Beautiful to assume a position that was structurally homologous to those of the True and the Good, long understood as potential parallels. Although the first efforts were ones that attempted to emphasize the unification of the human spirit, the triad, once formulated, was attractive to faculties theorists more interested in decomposing the soul. They seized upon the triad as corresponding to an emerging sense of a tripartition of the soul. Finally, the members of the triad became re-understood as values, now as orthogonal dimensions.
Originality/value
This seems to be the first time the story of the development of the triad – one of the most ubiquitous architectonics in social thought – has been told.