I first encountered Jean-François Lyotard’s work in the mid-1980s, after the publication of the English translation of his book The Postmodern Condition. It was a text that created quite a stir in the English-speaking academic world, drawing a lot of both praise and criticism. I was one of those to be critical, as in the first thing I ever wrote about Lyotard, a journal article for Radical Philosophy, where I argued there was a nihilistic quality to his thought.
Author: Kirsty Crosbie
Where will politicization of the response to COVID-19 end? When former President G.W. Bush issued calls to put partisanship aside and unite in the fight against COVID-19, President Trump virulently criticized the former, reproaching him with not taking his side when Democrats launched the impeachment process against him.
In the 2019-2020 winter, pre-COVID-19, the odds for Trump’s reelection were good… Unfortunately for him, the Covid health crisis reshuffled the deck.
Poetry aficionados, media archaeologists and scholars of modernism might have heard of the ‘godfather of the e-reader’ Bob Brown, and his infamous ‘Reading Machine’ – but his wife Rose is an equally compelling figure. In fact, her story changes how we understand the connections between technological and literary innovation, and their capacity to promote social change, and with one exception, it has remained untold.
Thanksgiving Model Buildings An article published in The Lady’s Newspaper in 1851 makes an explicit connection between creative production –…
If she were earning a living wage, the amount of time it would take to purchase the flat – only 393 square feet in size – would require 21, 874 hours of labour. In so many hours, Morison estimated, a person could read the bible 309.54 times, gestate 3.26 babies, or complete 2.48 lifetimes worth of pub visits.
Even before COVID-19, unprecedented levels of public and private borrowing placed debt at the centre of academic and public debates. If access to credit at this stage of the pandemic is crucial for keeping alive economies across the globe, the health crisis has further exacerbated our reliance on borrowing. Massive efforts are expected of states and central banks to support not only individual financial institutions but the financial system as a whole.
Anglophone literary criticism has over the last decade engaged in a searching analysis and critique of its own methods. Perhaps surprisingly, much of that debate has considered *how* one should engage in literary interpretation—whether one should read closely or from a distance, interpret in a paranoid or reparative way, emphasize the work’s surface or depth, engage in “critique” or some other mode of attachment—and rather less *why*. But we might benefit from asking that question more openly: what, after all, is the point of literary criticism? Why does this practice merit the sustained intellectual energy so many scholars have devoted to it?
The oldest layers of the surviving Zoroastrian texts are in Avestan language and commonly dated to the middle of the second millennium BCE. Exact dates and circumstances of composition, however, remain uncertain, so that little is known about the socio-political context from which these texts emerged. After two millennia of oral transmission, the texts were finally committed to writing, at a time when the language must have no longer been in active use.
Participants in the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota have emphasised historical continuity in the experience of racist oppression in the United States.