Development of English Legal Positivism from Bentham to Salmond and Brown: Leading Ideas in the Context of the Common Law Tradition

This article examines the peculiarities of the evolution of English legal positivism, which was the only direction of understanding law formed by professional lawyers, expressing the specifics of their legal consciousness, focused on understanding positive law and the practice of its implementation. The authors examine the key concepts that define the historical trajectory and problem field of legal positivism in the Anglo-American tradition, analyzing the legal teachings of T. Hobbes, D. Hume, J. Bentham, J. Austin, M. Hale, W. Blackstone, J. W. Salmond and W. J. Brown. The attention is drawn to the fact that Salmond lays down objections to the concept of law as a rule of the state and considers its main shortcomings. In his work “Jurisprudence or the Theory of Law”, Salmond presents the flaws and omissions of the “imperative theory of law”, among the proponents of which he names T. Hobbes, S. von Pufendorf, J. Bentham and J. Austin. Brown believes that the essence of law can be expressed by a set of three concepts: “will”, “command” and “reason”, and the just conception of law implies recognition of the elements of unity, growth and growth that is consciously directed towards the realization and achievement of the goal.

7. Chekhov’s heirs

‘Chekhov’s heirs’ highlights Anton Chekhov’s influence on the Anglo-American tradition of the short story. From the 1920s, and especially from the 1950s, a long line of short story writers have virtually self-identified as Chekhovians. Technically, there is no formula for writing a Chekhovian story. However, Chekhov advises against ‘lengthy verbiage’ and favours ‘extreme brevity’ and ‘total objectivity’. Chekhov’s stories are full of unfulfilled dreamers and therefore rich in ironies that usually remain latent, but once perceived show everything in a new light. Three fascinating stories written by Chekhovians include: Raymond Carver’s ‘Errand’ (1987), Grace Paley’s ‘A Conversation with my Father’ (1972), and Frank O’Connor’s ‘A Bachelor’s Story’ (1955).

The “Vernacular Process” and the (Re)construction of Tradition in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

The present paper is an attempt to explore, in and through the prism of Ralph W. Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the workings of Ellison’s “vernacular process” as a concept that informs the author’s critical views incorporated in the novel. More specifically, Ellison’s revisionary enterprise in this narrative demonstrates his view of African-American tradition as integrated in American and Western tradition. While the form of “invisible criticism” in which Ellison engages is a rather self-conscious manifestation of his critical model of the “vernacular process,” the present work contends that this Ellisonian model actually foreshadows Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s critical paradigm of “Signifyin(g).” What Gates names “literary Signification” stands for an indigenous African-American form of literary revision consisting in a black text’s repeating with difference of another black text’s tropes or rhetorical strategies, or such text’s appropriation of aspects of form in a white antecedent text. Through “literary Signification,” Invisible Man revises African-American texts exemplified in the present article by Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Native Son (1940). Likewise, Ellison’s narrative also revisits American and European texts, an enterprise to be seen in the present work’s examination of Ellison’s revision of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Walt Whitman’s romantic poetry, and T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). By establishing through “literary Signification” his African-American literary “relatives” as well as his Western and American “ancestors,” Ellison ultimately constructs the African-American literary tradition as embedded in the Euro-American tradition and thus underlines the syncretic character of American literature and culture. Keywords: Integrative, Revision, Tradition, Signifyin(G), “Vernacular Process”.

Years in Cultural Studies: 2013

n Eastern Europe, which is the focus of our study, different national scholarly traditions assigned their own place to the study of culture. Although the influence of the kulturologia (“culturology”) schools installed at Russian universities in the 1980s radiated out into Eastern European countries, local academic communities dictated the approach to the study of popular culture. While the Polish field of kulturoznawstwo was propelled by internal forces from the early 1970s onwards, in Czechoslovakia, kulturologie emerged as a new discipline around the fall of the Communist regime. Even so, it failed to take off and by 2012 had vanished completely from the Czech Republic. Central European countries were also affected by the German academic tradition of Kulturwissenschaften with its emphasis on philosophy and aesthetics. Our inquiry highlights the first international conference on cultural studies in the Czech Republic in 2013. It was during this event that a group of new postdocs from Charles University, including ourselves, raised the topic of changes in Eastern European popular culture due to the political transformation in 1989. This group had also arranged for Ann Gray, the final director of the UK Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) to give a keynote address at the conference, a gesture that clearly linked the CCCS with the group’s own Centre for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPK) established three years earlier. From the outset, CSPK’s organizers aimed to promote the Anglo-American tradition of cultural studies both in the academy and among the general public. At the same time, they sought to retain their independence from academic structures and funding systems that might restrict their political activism.

Narațiune și interacțiune: preliminarii teoretice comparate

The present study aims to put forward a state of the art regarding interaction in narratives, providing a blueprint for further analysis of the phenomenon in Romania. It starts by taking into account in a comparative manner the “popular” definitions of narrative and how these might affect the general reception of narratives in various cultural spaces, comparing the Anglo-American tradition to the Romanian one. It then proceeds to identify and correlate different theories of interaction in narrative, focusing on models by Janet Murray, Jan van Dijk and Eric Zimmerman.

The Theatre of Historical Revision: An Analysis of the Native American Drama Tradition

We attempt to analyse the form and content of major Native American plays to discuss their relationship with the traditional English drama and its content. By looking at plays of key Native American playwrights, we show that the Native American tradition goes against the English tradition of drama in its form by challenging the unities of time and place and characterization. It also brings in elements of Native American tradition of storytelling such as the blend of the sacred and the profane, the use of humor, the attitude towards facticity, to the tradition of drama to carve out a unique space for itself through which it attempts to challenge the dominant narratives of history, Native American culture, and at the same time highlight the problems the Native American nations face currently.

Lessons from the Use of Ranked Choice Voting in American Presidential Primaries

Grounded in experience in 2020, both major political parties have reasons to expand use of ranked choice voting (RCV) in their 2024 presidential primaries. RCV may offer a ‘win-win’ solution benefiting both the parties and their voters. RCV would build on both the pre-1968 American tradition of parties determining a coalitional presidential nominee through multiple ballots at party conventions and the modern practice of allowing voters to effectively choose their nominees in primaries. Increasingly used by parties around the world in picking their leaders, RCV may allow voters to crowd-source a coalitional nominee. Most published research about RCV focuses on state and local elections. In contrast, this article analyzes the impact on voters, candidates, and parties from five state Democratic parties using RCV in party-run presidential nomination contests in 2020. First, it uses polls and results to examine how more widespread use of RCV might have affected the trajectory of contests for the 2016 Republican nomination. Second, it contrasts how more than three million voters in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries backed withdrawn candidates with the low rate of such wasted votes for withdrawn candidates in the states with RCV ballots. Finally, it concludes with an examination of how RCV might best interact with the parties’ current rules and potential changes to those rules.

Camping Grounds

Camping appears to be a simple proposition, a time-honored way of getting away from it all. Yet as this book demonstrates, the simplicity of camping is deceptive, its history and meanings far from obvious. Why do some Americans find pleasure in sleeping outside, particularly when so many others, past and present, have had to do so for reasons other than recreation? A closer look at the history of camping since the Civil War reveals unexpected connections between its various forms and its deeper significance as an American tradition linked to core beliefs about nature and national belonging. Never only a vacation choice, camping has been something people do out of dire necessity and as a tactic of political protest. Still, the dominance of recreational camping as a modern ideal and natural idyll has obscured other forms from our collective memory. Camping Grounds rediscovers these unexpected and interwoven histories of sleeping outside. It uses extensive research to trace surprising links between such varied campers as veterans, tramps, John Muir, newly freed African Americans, and early leisure campers in the nineteenth century; federal campground designers, Depression-era transients, family car campers, backpacking enthusiasts, countercultural youth, and political activists in the twentieth century; the crisis of the unsheltered and the tent-based Occupy movement in the twenty-first. These entwined stories show how Americans camp to claim a place in the republic and why public spaces of nature are critical to how we relate to nature, the nation, and each other.