Enlightened Attitudes Towards Otherness Tolerance And Rationality In Sir Walter Scott S Novels

Studiul aduce o lumină nouă asupra operei lui Walter Scott, arătând relevanța ei în contextul contemporan. Combinând într-o abordare neo-formalistă teoriile lui Hayden White, Bogdan Ștefănescu și Mikhail Bakhtin, volumul de față demonstrează modul în care alteritatea, în ficțiunea lui Scott, aduce remediile necesare societății, dacă societatea permite existența alterității alături de ea, fără încercarea de a-i șterge diferențele. Importante sunt momentele de suspendare temporară a codurilor culturale, în stilul conservator al parodiei lui Bakhtin, permițând astfel o supapă de evacuare a tensiunilor sociale. Dincolo de jargonul tehnic, cartea pune în fața cititorului pasajele cele mai distractive din opera vastă a lui Scott, precum și un studiu interesant al iluminismului scoțian și al sferei publice care a reușit să încorporeze feedback-ul culturii populare, ajungând la început de secol XIX să exporte modelul său de succes în întreaga lume.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University