Men’s Action Fictions

No genre explored the escapist lure of apocalypse more fully than the new pulp genre of men’s action fiction, where the 1960s-style fallout shelter serves as a measure of the faith of the hero in the structure of government and authority and the society it underpins. The more elaborate the shelter and the accoutrements of survival that surround it, the more likely is nuclear war to have been a good war. For rightwing writers, the distinct probability of urban apocalypse afforded a new political equation for the 1980s: eliminating the densely packed blue-state populations, especially on the coasts, was a quick way to imagine changing the electoral balance. Nevertheless, men’s action fiction takes pains to frame its heroes’ choices in rational rather than ideological terms. The heroic protagonists recognizably follow in the hard-boiled noir tradition of antisocial guardians of society in a fallen world threatened by criminal nihilists from the right and ineffectual liberals from the left. The bunker fantasies of men’s action fiction, in the dialectic they stage between survival and survivalism, posit in pulp form the hard questions that had plagued policymakers since Harry Truman first made the decision to use the bomb. That their cartoonishly excessive qualities neatly mirror the extreme rhetoric of the Cold Warriors in the Reagan White House should also remind us that the contradictory impulses they so exuberantly narrativize remain deeply rooted in the contradictions of American identity and American history.

Sex and the Internet

The Internet was widely understood as a good thing at these schools, yet it also had risks: pornography, unsupervised access to the opposite sex, and a tendency to coarsen discourse and interactions. Maybe the greatest risk was also the most existential: what if the Internet led children away from the faith? The Internet and sex were often discussed together at these schools, and so this chapter also highlights how discussions of sexuality at all four schools emphasized the importance of virginity and minimized the possibility of same-sex attractions except as temptations from a fallen world. Students were divided about how they could best engage questions of fairness to LGBTQ people, and at least one bisexual student at Good Tree shared her struggles with the author, saying she wanted to avoid the temptation of a gay relationship, but she believed people with attractions like hers should be more welcomed and understood.

The Fall as a Worldwide Catastrophe and the Problem of Elaboration a Language for Its Description

В статье основное внимание уделяется одной из ключевых проблем, находящейся на грани библейской и светских наук, - познание состояния мира до и после грехопадения. При описании последствий грехопадения были выработаны три подхода, имеющие своих характерных представителей: еп. Василия (Родзянко), считавшего, что между первозданным и падшим миром нет никаких корреляций; прот. Леонида Цыпина - катастрофа грехопадения не изменила кардинальным образом законы мироздания; диак. Николая Серебрякова - глобальная катастрофа грехопадения категорически сказалась на состоянии мира, однако полностью не уничтожила его преемственности с первозданным миром. Также уделяется внимание гносеологическому вопросу: может ли привести рациональное познание к Богу? The article focuses on one of the key problems on the verge of biblical and secular sciences - knowledge of the state of the World before and after the Fall. In describing the consequences of the Fall, three approaches have been developed that have their own characteristic representatives: bishop Basil (Rodzianko), who believed that there are no correlations between the primordial and the fallen World; archpriest Leonid Tsypin - the catastrophe of the Fall did not radically change the laws of the universe; deacon Nicholay Serebryakov - the global catastrophe of the Fall had a categorical effect on the state of the World, but did not completely destroy its continuity with the primordial World. Attention is also paid to the gnosiological question: could it be possible to bring rational knowledge to God?

The Lists of Paradise Regained: An Economy of the Full and the Empty

This article works from Madeleine Jeay’s Le Commerce des Mots (2006), Umberto Eco’s Infinity of Lists (2009), and Bernard Sève’s Philosophie des Listes (2010) to understand the abundance of lists in John Milton’s Paradise Regained. The lists in Paradise Regained emerge from the following conditions: the fantasy of chaos remaining an unfulfilled horizon, the complicated coherence among things escaping the worst disorder, and the tortuous cohesive power of analogy barely unifying a worldview by holding the chaos of reality at bay. In sum, the lists in the short epic would mark, as a manifestation, the trace, like the shadow, of the intractable fallen world within the very act of worldliness (much like the creation of an alternative Christian ethos), always leaving a space of nothingness necessarily paradoxical and in some ways astonishingly so.

Sexual Exegetics and the Female Text

Chapter 1 argues that paternity’s claims to authority were undermined by the inherent doubts associated with siring offspring. The inability for a man to know his children to be his own with certainty epitomized the divine limitations that had been placed upon men’s cognition. There was no perfect reciprocity between sign and meaning within a fallen world; men were forced to acquiesce to a semiotics of doubt and insufficiency. Chaucer explores these themes within the Manciple’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale. In the former he writes affirmations of paternal certainty out of his source texts, and in the latter he depicts the search of a husband for cognitive certainty, a search that condemns the man’s wife, Griselda, to torturous scrutiny. Chaucer concludes that men must simply live with their own doubt, for doubt is a reminder to man that he is human, that true authority belongs to God alone.

Father Chaucer

Paternity is a powerful metaphor for literary authority and legitimacy, and thus Geoffrey Chaucer has been granted the supposedly supreme honor of being termed the “father of English poetry.” And yet, as this book argues, the idea of paternity as unchallenged authority is a far more modern construct. For Chaucer, the ability to create with certainty, with assurance in one’s own posterity, was the ardent dream that haunted human men. It was, however, a dream defined by its impossibility. For Chaucer and his peers occupied a fallen world, one in which all true authority belonged to God alone. This book argues that man’s struggle to create something that would last beyond death is at the very heart of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer faces his own desire as a poet and a man to sire something that will last within the world. But Chaucer also knew deeply that such a dream would remain always out of reach for mortal men. And so Chaucer’s Tales taunts men with the multiple breakdowns of human generation, the insufficiencies of human cognition, genius, and hereditary institutions. Yet Chaucer also makes it clear that he counts himself among this humble species, a fellow pilgrim beset by the longing to wrest some small authority from the sum of his own flesh.