TAKE THE GOOD WITH THE BAD: A GIRARDIAN RECOMMENDATION FOR AUDITING PEDAGOGY

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-163
Author(s):  
David N. Herda ◽  
John N. Herda
Keyword(s):  
Current Literature ◽  
Real World ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Classroom Experience ◽  
Rene Girard ◽  
Current State ◽  
René Girard

This essay considers the current state of the pedagogical auditing literature using a theoretical lens proposed by philosopher and literary critic René Girard. In extant pedagogical auditing cases that are based on historical events, auditors are often portrayed as villains. Presently, there are few pedagogical cases in which auditors are depicted as heroes. Appending the current literature with real world illustrations and accounts of auditors behaving virtuously would help balance the literature and improve the classroom experience for students. Moreover, these positive accounts should be memorialized in the auditing profession's history.

The Sacred and the Myth: Havel’s Greengrocer, Twenty Years Later

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-293
Author(s):  
Marci Shore
Keyword(s):  
Literary Critic ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
Vaclav Havel ◽  
Rene Girard ◽  
René Girard ◽  
Cultural Order ◽  
Ontological Reality

This essay juxtaposes two thinkers: the French literary critic and philosopher René Girard (1923–2015) and the Czech playwright, essayist, and dissident Václav Havel (1936–2011). In particular, the text examines Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless through the lens of Girard’s structuralist model of mimetic desire, violent sacrifice, and a cultural order sustained by prohibition, ritual, and myth. Arguing against the French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), Girard insisted on a reality behind the text: myths disclosed real victims. Girard and Havel shared a merciless anti-populism: society was guilty. They shared something else as well: in an age of a loss of faith in Marxism and all grand narratives, and of skepticism about the possibility of any stable meaning, subjectivity, and truth, Havel and Girard insisted on the ontological reality of both truth and lies, and on the ontological reality of the distinction between them.

L'identité du social et du religieux selon René Girard

1980 ◽  
Vol 78 (37) ◽  
pp. 71-90
Author(s):  
Claude Troisfontaines
Keyword(s):  
Rene Girard ◽  
René Girard

Polarized Readings of René Girard: Utilizing Girardian Thought to Break a Theological and Philosophical Impasse

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-42
Author(s):  
Colby Dickinson
Keyword(s):  
Religious Values ◽  
Rene Girard ◽  
René Girard

René Girard’s work often seems suspect to liberals, because it appears as a totalizing narrative. Such hesitancy with respect to either dismissing or endorsing it follows from the demise of “grand narratives” that brought with them imperialistic and hegemonic tendencies. Yet if a liberal viewpoint does not embrace Girard, it is for different reasons that conservatives are either fully supportive of his thought as promising a return to religious values or hesitant about accepting his theories because they critique a form of violence inherent to any community. Girardian thought, it can be argued, has focused on deconstructing mythological justifications for violent activity at the expense of establishing a fruitful position regarding positive communal formations. The tensions between these juxtaposed liberal and conservative viewpoints, as taken up in this article, illustrate an impasse between deconstructivist-genealogists (representing trends within liberal discourse) and communitarians (representing conservative or orthodox viewpoints)—one that shows up in a variety of contexts today. Highlighting this particular standoff in interpretations of Girard can, nevertheless, yield important insights regarding the ultimate significance of his work.

ERGUN ÖZBUDUN, Contemporary Turkish Politics: Challenges to Democratic Consolidation (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2000). Pp. 181. $49.95 cloth.

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 657-660
Author(s):  
Frank Tachau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Current Literature ◽  
Real World ◽  
Democratic Consolidation ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
Turkish Politics ◽  
Political Studies

Based on Professor Özbudun's lectures at Bilkent University, this book is at once compact, highly readable, and very insightful. Unlike much current literature on Turkey, the analysis is set in a broad and informed comparative context. Turkey, the author points out, has been left out of comparative political studies, particularly those encompassing the Middle East and southern Europe, in which arguably it could (or should) have been included. Scholarly neglect thus reflects real-world politics: Turkey falls between two worlds, one of which it once largely controlled, the other to which it currently aspires to belong. This lacuna is one of the factors that persuaded Özbudun to publish this volume.

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