Prometheus, Unbound

2021 ◽  
pp. 000313482110545
Author(s):  
Daniel J Waters

SUBMITTED FOR “SURGICAL REFLECTIONS” A short essay on the lessons “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus” still has to teach us.

Author(s):  
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Keyword(s):  

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Patrick J. Connolly

In a recent article Fred Ablondi compares the different approaches to occasionalism put forward by two eighteenth-century Newtonians, Colin Maclaurin and Andrew Baxter. The goal of this short essay is to respond to Ablondi by clarifying some key features of Maclaurin's views on occasionalism and the cause of gravitational attraction. In particular, I explore Maclaurin's matter theory, his views on the explanatory limits of mechanism, and his appeals to the authority of Newton. This leads to a clearer picture of the way in which Maclaurin understood gravitational attraction and the workings of nature.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-187
Author(s):  
Herman Westerink ◽  
Philippe Van Haute

Although Freud's ‘Family Romances’ from 1909 is hardly ever discussed at length in secondary literature, this article highlights this short essay as an important and informative text about Freud's changing perspectives on sexuality in the period in which the text was written. Given the fact that Freud, in his 1905 Three Essays, develops a radical theory of infantile sexuality as polymorphously perverse and as autoerotic pleasure, we argue that ‘Family Romances’, together with the closely related essay on infantile sexual theories (1908), paves the way for new theories of sexuality defined in terms of object relations informed by knowledge of sexual difference. ‘Family Romances’, in other words, preludes the introduction of the Oedipus complex, but also – interestingly – gives room for a Jungian view of sexuality and sexual phantasy. ‘Family Romances’ is thus a good illustration of the complex way in which Freud's theories of sexuality developed through time.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Isabel Serna

This short essay sketches the career of Anita Uada Maris Boggs, cofounder of the Bureau of Commercial Education, a charitable organization that from the 1910s through the 1930s circulated a library of sponsored films. I argue that Boggs's absence from film historiography has been doubly determined: first by the relative invisibility of educational film, and second by ideologies of gender that obscured women's work in the film industry, broadly construed, behind that of their male collaborators.


2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 38-39
Author(s):  
Philip Tite

A short essay, in responding to an online roundtable (the Religious Studies Project), explores the role of progressive ideology in the academic study of religion, specifically with a focus on debates over Russell McCutcheon's distinction between scholars functioning as cultural critics or caretakers of religious traditions. This short piece is part of the "Editor's Corner" (an occasional section of the Bulletin where the editors offer provocative musings on theoretical challenges facing the discipline).


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 324-333
Author(s):  
Tobias Kelly

Abstract This short essay offers a broad and necessarily incomplete review of the current state of the human rights struggle against torture and ill-treatment. It sketches four widespread assumptions in that struggle: 1) that torture is an issue of detention and interrogation; 2) that political or security detainees are archetypal victims of torture; 3) that legal reform is one of the best ways to fight torture; and 4) that human rights monitoring helps to stamp out violence. These four assumptions have all played an important role in the history of the human rights fight against torture, but also resulted in limitations in terms of the interventions that are used, the forms of violence that human rights practitioners respond to, and the types of survivors they seek to protect. Taken together, these four assumptions have created challenges for the human rights community in confronting the multiple forms of torture rooted in the deep and widespread inequality experienced by many poor and marginalized groups. The essay ends by pointing to some emerging themes in the fight against torture, such as a focus on inequality, extra-custodial violence, and the role of corruption.


2020 ◽  
pp. 174387212097199
Author(s):  
Kathleen Birrell

This short essay will dwell upon the ‘law of literature and the literature of law’, as illuminated in the enduring scholarship and intellectual legacy of Peter Fitzpatrick. Reading with Fitzpatrick, we must grapple with a law that is both constituted and subverted by recourse to the supplement of fiction. These ambivalent ‘affines’, law and literature, share in an oscillatory rhythm: each is constituted and enlivened by an unbounded exteriority, yet each must be rendered normatively determinate. I reflect upon the ways in which Fitzpatrick’s account of ‘law like literature’ grasps and hones the methodological challenge implicit in this reading: to read law as literature and literature as law. Yet further, I extend a reading of Fitzpatrick’s scholarship that acknowledges this fictive law as not merely susceptible to but constituted by decoloniality.


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